Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Chains ❯ Corner Me ( Chapter 90 )
[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]
By: Miko No Hoshi 
Anime/Manga: Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst / Romance / Drama | Type: Alternate Universe | Uploaded On: 07.24.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.4K | Visits: 228 | Status: Work In Progress
Anime/Manga: Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst / Romance / Drama | Type: Alternate Universe | Uploaded On: 07.24.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.4K | Visits: 228 | Status: Work In Progress
Chapter Ninety: Corner Me
Aya pressed his back against the cool stone, shrinking further into the shadows. Perfectly still, he listened. For a moment, there was nothing, then footsteps, at a distance but drawing closer. Two.
He swallowed hard and drew his sword from its sheath, determined not to think beyond the moves he would make. He would not think of results—no, that was weak. He knew he was going to kill them.
The footsteps paused, and for a terrible second he was sure that they were on to him, then they crossed the entrance to the alley.
Aya leapt forward, katana coming down in a graceful arc. The perfected motion was stalled as the blade connected hard against the first man’s shoulder, slicing through the fabric of his expensive suit and rending the flesh beneath. He fell, his weight trying to take the sword down as well, but Aya’s grasp was firm.
The second man seemed to be in shock, staring at Aya as he shook. He had no time to work it out as with one, hard thrust, the redhead buried the sword in the man’s chest. He gasped, futilely lifting his hands to grab at the blade. Aya watched, horrified and grotesquely fascinated as his struggles stopped. He felt bile rise at the back of his throat as he had to kick the man to get him off the end of the sword.
But none of this showed on his face. It was perfectly blank, and though he couldn’t convince himself to thank Crawford for the lesson, he was almost glad he knew how to do it. Because if they could see how awful it was for him, then the men might not have been scared at all.
~*~
“Okay?” Yohji questioned.
“Shower,” Aya replied.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
He watched Aya, bloodspattered and exhausted, walk down the hall away from him. It was their third mission, and Yohji was beginning to think that the distance he felt with Aya was going to be the norm after those sorts of things. It was if the boy needed some emotional room to put it behind him. Yohji understood that and was willing to back off, at least a little.
So he went outside, smoked, drank a beer (a considerably lesser amount than he would have liked to have, but what he was beginning to think was going to be his new standard). Then he went back upstairs, got his own shower, and finally headed to their room. Aya was on the bed, dressed in his gray pajamas and looking much less fierce than he had a few minutes prior. He was tired, barely awake, and it comforted Yohji to realize the redhead was waiting for him to go to sleep.
~*~
Yohji pushed his thin hip against the shop door, listening to the bells tinkle as he got inside and tried to find someone to help with his burden. Fortunately, Ken was quickly by his side, relieving him of the white paper bags and drink container. Yohji turned around to flip the closed sign while Ken spread out their questionable feast near the register. It was Friday, and they didn’t have much time to eat before the afternoon rush started.
“Aya,” Yohji beckoned the boy from the back of the shop. The redhead sat down the pruning shears he was using and came up to join them. Yohji handed him a container of fries and they all stood together around the counter.
“Here,” the blonde shuffled the drinks, keeping the diet one for himself.
They ate in silence, knowing time was limited. As soon as Ken had finished his second burger, he brought out the order slips and started flipping through them. There were always more on Friday and Saturday as people prepared for events and evenings out.
“One of us has got to go to Chiba to deliver all those dahlias,” he said.
“Are they done?” Yohji asked as he wiped his hands on a napkin.
“Yeah. Aya finished them while you were gone.”
“All of them?” Yohji raised an eyebrow in the boy’s direction. Aya did nothing, but Ken nodded.
“But someone’s got to do the delivery at three,” Ken reiterated.
It didn’t take long for Yohji to figure out why that was a problem. One of them would have to go, and it would take both of the others to man the shop through the rush of girls and then more serious customers as they got out of school and work respectively. In all likelihood, Aya wouldn’t be able to hide out in the greenhouse.
“Okay,” Yohji said, slowly, thinking.
“I’ll go?” Ken asked.
Yohji nodded, looking at Aya who, having caught on, was staring at his hands.
Assignment clarified, Ken took one of the more simple order slips and went to gather some flowers while Yohji and Aya remained near the register.
“You’ll be fine,” the blonde assured as he picked up the trash and put it in one of the white bags. “They’re not going to hurt you.”
He got a glare for that and returned it with a sigh, “Yes, I know you know that. Just...will it be okay? If it’s too much we’ll figure something else out.”
Aya just looked at him, the glare shifting into his more confused look. It was the same expression Yohji got when he asked Aya’s opinion of anything more complicated than food (and sometimes that too). It was clear he wasn’t going to get an answer.
“Do your best,” he said, “but if it’s too bad, you tell me. Got it?”
“I’ll be fine,” the boy snapped, the glare returning in full force; it was getting to be a rather disturbing look.
Aya turned and went back to his flowers.
Huh. Yohji took a second to be puzzled. He’d expected the calm ‘Yes, Yohji.’
For weeks, ever since that odd comment the first day the boy had come to the shop, he’d wondered what Aya was really like. He had no delusions that he was truly submissive or so terribly quiet. More often now Yohji was catching glances of a real personality, unfortunately, it seemed that Aya might turn out to have, along with a good degree of intelligence, a true redheaded temperament. Yohji expected it would cause him problems in the long run, but for the moment, he was pretty happy with this development of will and the occasional snippy comment that simultaneously made him feel proud and stupid for having any doubts in the first place.
Still, he would watch Aya carefully when the customers came in, because as much as he and Aya wanted it to be fine, sometimes it wasn’t.
~*~
Calm down, Aya commanded himself. He wanted to pace, but he forced himself to go calmly to the cooler and put away the arrangement, the last of the daily orders. People would be coming soon to pick them up, and the girls would arrive sooner than that.
He wasn’t scared of them. Not at all. But he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Before, in the flood of people, he hadn’t been able to cling to the present moment, the flashbacks overwhelming him. Aya would like to think they were getting better, but he was yet to get through a day without confronting the problem. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, just remembering something, even something terrible—that was okay. No one noticed that. It was when he really ceased to be with the present that bothered him; he would actually lose time, being totally transported back to…there.
He hated that. It left him shaken and unsure, and it reminded him that he could at any time be taken back. And it worried Yohji, making him look on Aya with those concerned eyes, and, worse, it made Aya crave his presence as a stay against the inevitable seizure of his person by Schuldig or Crawford or whomever might be lurking in the shadows. Aya didn’t want to need him. Anyone.
But here he was, cowering in the face of young girls.
A sardonic smile threatened to pull at his lips, but he willed it away as he took a seat at the work table and laid a half dozen iris in front of him.
~*~
Yohji stood half in front of Aya, hands raised as he tried to fend off the circle of girls that gathered noisily around them.
“He’s back!”
“Can you believe it? Look, Saiko!”
“I love his hair!”
“Aya, right? They call you Aya?”
“Isn’t that a girl’s—”
“Be nice, Ma-chan! Ooh, look—”
“Wait! He’s going to say something! Shh!”
It was painfully clear to Yohji that Aya had no intention of saying anything. The boy had maneuvered quickly to get his back to the coolers, and Yohji had stepped in. Now Aya’s eyes were wide in surprise, at the attention, the aggressiveness of the teenage hoard. Yohji had to admit, it was intense.
Unfortunately, it was also a daily part of the job.
“Tell them your name,” Yohji whispered; it carried surprisingly far the circle of girls fell into a hush punctuated by the occasional giggle.
“Aya,” the boy said, adding nothing to the bit of information.
“Fujimiya Aya,” Yohji supplied, “our new florist. Please, ladies don’t scare this one off!”
“Ma, Yohji-san, we haven’t scared anyone off!” one girl protested.
“Ah,” the blonde paused and pretended to think, “but Aya-san is very shy, and your attention overwhelms him. That’s why he’s been hiding in the greenhouse with his flowers.”
“We didn’t mean to!”
“We’re sorry!”
“We’ll be better, won’t we?”
A chorus of ‘yes’s followed, and Yohji offered them an award-winning smile before nodding sagely, noting with some amusement that Aya was glaring at him for having dared suggest he had been hiding.
“Now, if you’re buying flowers, stay here and talk to our resident recluse,” he suggested, “and if not, come talk to me—especially if you’re over eighteen.”
Having drawn away a portion of the girls and in the process of stoking his ego by collecting offers of dates, Yohji kept an eye on Aya. The girls seemed to have taken his advice to heart and were keeping it down to a hush. The circle had backed off, and one at a time they approached Aya to ask for single flowers and, inevitably, to ask him some question or another.
Aya wasn’t responding to these, at all. He would go, get the flower, and hand it wordlessly over. And while there was a good deal of speculation amongst the girls, Yohji got the feeling that the boy’s reticence was not so much driving them away as driving them to plotting.
Soon enough, he saw the result of this initial planning as three girls approached together to ask for an actual arrangement. Two of them were actually brought to blushing when Aya looked up to listen to their order.
Yohji supposed it should be expected. Any of their group could garner a blush with some attention, himself being the most practiced and rewarded in this aspect, but it usually took a few words or at least a touch here or there. Aya was doing it with the simplicity of a look.
As he looked at the boy, it struck Yohji, not for the first time, that Aya wasn’t just exotic; he was almost…beautiful. And there were fast becoming fewer reservations to this statement: the hollows of his cheeks had filled out almost completely (with no roundness of face, but an appealing set of almost feminine angles), his striking eyes were no longer constantly shadowed by dark circles, his hands not so bone-thin. He was slight, but picking up muscle, quiet, but no longer with that obviously scared tremble about him. Yohji had no doubts that the boy was simply getting better at hiding some of his problems now that he had made the most basic recovery, but the picture from the outside was shockingly attractive.
And the girls were after him.
Yohji would have been worried, was, at the start, but Aya was dealing with them in a quiet way that (not given the information the blonde had) read as cold efficiency.
~*~
Aya went to the cooler, opened the door, and looked at the small bucket of roses. He took a deep breath and told himself again that all he had to do was get the flowers.
He was not going to shake. He was not going to hide. He was not going to think about anything else except getting those flowers.
He was going to be normal about the whole thing.
Taking out a single pink rose, he brought it back to the table and carefully snipped the stem and placed on a small capsule of water before wrapping it in a bit of green. He glanced, just to check his trajectory, at the waiting girl. She was looking expectantly at him, and Aya was quick to look back down.
He took another breath and reminded himself what Yohji had said. He didn’t have to let anyone but Yohji touch him. He didn’t have to let these people do anything to him. Aya clung to this knowledge as he pressed on with his task, glancing up often to make sure the blonde was still there.
~tbc~
Converting /tmp/php0hiBZU to /dev/stdout
Aya pressed his back against the cool stone, shrinking further into the shadows. Perfectly still, he listened. For a moment, there was nothing, then footsteps, at a distance but drawing closer. Two.
He swallowed hard and drew his sword from its sheath, determined not to think beyond the moves he would make. He would not think of results—no, that was weak. He knew he was going to kill them.
The footsteps paused, and for a terrible second he was sure that they were on to him, then they crossed the entrance to the alley.
Aya leapt forward, katana coming down in a graceful arc. The perfected motion was stalled as the blade connected hard against the first man’s shoulder, slicing through the fabric of his expensive suit and rending the flesh beneath. He fell, his weight trying to take the sword down as well, but Aya’s grasp was firm.
The second man seemed to be in shock, staring at Aya as he shook. He had no time to work it out as with one, hard thrust, the redhead buried the sword in the man’s chest. He gasped, futilely lifting his hands to grab at the blade. Aya watched, horrified and grotesquely fascinated as his struggles stopped. He felt bile rise at the back of his throat as he had to kick the man to get him off the end of the sword.
But none of this showed on his face. It was perfectly blank, and though he couldn’t convince himself to thank Crawford for the lesson, he was almost glad he knew how to do it. Because if they could see how awful it was for him, then the men might not have been scared at all.
~*~
“Okay?” Yohji questioned.
“Shower,” Aya replied.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
He watched Aya, bloodspattered and exhausted, walk down the hall away from him. It was their third mission, and Yohji was beginning to think that the distance he felt with Aya was going to be the norm after those sorts of things. It was if the boy needed some emotional room to put it behind him. Yohji understood that and was willing to back off, at least a little.
So he went outside, smoked, drank a beer (a considerably lesser amount than he would have liked to have, but what he was beginning to think was going to be his new standard). Then he went back upstairs, got his own shower, and finally headed to their room. Aya was on the bed, dressed in his gray pajamas and looking much less fierce than he had a few minutes prior. He was tired, barely awake, and it comforted Yohji to realize the redhead was waiting for him to go to sleep.
~*~
Yohji pushed his thin hip against the shop door, listening to the bells tinkle as he got inside and tried to find someone to help with his burden. Fortunately, Ken was quickly by his side, relieving him of the white paper bags and drink container. Yohji turned around to flip the closed sign while Ken spread out their questionable feast near the register. It was Friday, and they didn’t have much time to eat before the afternoon rush started.
“Aya,” Yohji beckoned the boy from the back of the shop. The redhead sat down the pruning shears he was using and came up to join them. Yohji handed him a container of fries and they all stood together around the counter.
“Here,” the blonde shuffled the drinks, keeping the diet one for himself.
They ate in silence, knowing time was limited. As soon as Ken had finished his second burger, he brought out the order slips and started flipping through them. There were always more on Friday and Saturday as people prepared for events and evenings out.
“One of us has got to go to Chiba to deliver all those dahlias,” he said.
“Are they done?” Yohji asked as he wiped his hands on a napkin.
“Yeah. Aya finished them while you were gone.”
“All of them?” Yohji raised an eyebrow in the boy’s direction. Aya did nothing, but Ken nodded.
“But someone’s got to do the delivery at three,” Ken reiterated.
It didn’t take long for Yohji to figure out why that was a problem. One of them would have to go, and it would take both of the others to man the shop through the rush of girls and then more serious customers as they got out of school and work respectively. In all likelihood, Aya wouldn’t be able to hide out in the greenhouse.
“Okay,” Yohji said, slowly, thinking.
“I’ll go?” Ken asked.
Yohji nodded, looking at Aya who, having caught on, was staring at his hands.
Assignment clarified, Ken took one of the more simple order slips and went to gather some flowers while Yohji and Aya remained near the register.
“You’ll be fine,” the blonde assured as he picked up the trash and put it in one of the white bags. “They’re not going to hurt you.”
He got a glare for that and returned it with a sigh, “Yes, I know you know that. Just...will it be okay? If it’s too much we’ll figure something else out.”
Aya just looked at him, the glare shifting into his more confused look. It was the same expression Yohji got when he asked Aya’s opinion of anything more complicated than food (and sometimes that too). It was clear he wasn’t going to get an answer.
“Do your best,” he said, “but if it’s too bad, you tell me. Got it?”
“I’ll be fine,” the boy snapped, the glare returning in full force; it was getting to be a rather disturbing look.
Aya turned and went back to his flowers.
Huh. Yohji took a second to be puzzled. He’d expected the calm ‘Yes, Yohji.’
For weeks, ever since that odd comment the first day the boy had come to the shop, he’d wondered what Aya was really like. He had no delusions that he was truly submissive or so terribly quiet. More often now Yohji was catching glances of a real personality, unfortunately, it seemed that Aya might turn out to have, along with a good degree of intelligence, a true redheaded temperament. Yohji expected it would cause him problems in the long run, but for the moment, he was pretty happy with this development of will and the occasional snippy comment that simultaneously made him feel proud and stupid for having any doubts in the first place.
Still, he would watch Aya carefully when the customers came in, because as much as he and Aya wanted it to be fine, sometimes it wasn’t.
~*~
Calm down, Aya commanded himself. He wanted to pace, but he forced himself to go calmly to the cooler and put away the arrangement, the last of the daily orders. People would be coming soon to pick them up, and the girls would arrive sooner than that.
He wasn’t scared of them. Not at all. But he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Before, in the flood of people, he hadn’t been able to cling to the present moment, the flashbacks overwhelming him. Aya would like to think they were getting better, but he was yet to get through a day without confronting the problem. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, just remembering something, even something terrible—that was okay. No one noticed that. It was when he really ceased to be with the present that bothered him; he would actually lose time, being totally transported back to…there.
He hated that. It left him shaken and unsure, and it reminded him that he could at any time be taken back. And it worried Yohji, making him look on Aya with those concerned eyes, and, worse, it made Aya crave his presence as a stay against the inevitable seizure of his person by Schuldig or Crawford or whomever might be lurking in the shadows. Aya didn’t want to need him. Anyone.
But here he was, cowering in the face of young girls.
A sardonic smile threatened to pull at his lips, but he willed it away as he took a seat at the work table and laid a half dozen iris in front of him.
~*~
Yohji stood half in front of Aya, hands raised as he tried to fend off the circle of girls that gathered noisily around them.
“He’s back!”
“Can you believe it? Look, Saiko!”
“I love his hair!”
“Aya, right? They call you Aya?”
“Isn’t that a girl’s—”
“Be nice, Ma-chan! Ooh, look—”
“Wait! He’s going to say something! Shh!”
It was painfully clear to Yohji that Aya had no intention of saying anything. The boy had maneuvered quickly to get his back to the coolers, and Yohji had stepped in. Now Aya’s eyes were wide in surprise, at the attention, the aggressiveness of the teenage hoard. Yohji had to admit, it was intense.
Unfortunately, it was also a daily part of the job.
“Tell them your name,” Yohji whispered; it carried surprisingly far the circle of girls fell into a hush punctuated by the occasional giggle.
“Aya,” the boy said, adding nothing to the bit of information.
“Fujimiya Aya,” Yohji supplied, “our new florist. Please, ladies don’t scare this one off!”
“Ma, Yohji-san, we haven’t scared anyone off!” one girl protested.
“Ah,” the blonde paused and pretended to think, “but Aya-san is very shy, and your attention overwhelms him. That’s why he’s been hiding in the greenhouse with his flowers.”
“We didn’t mean to!”
“We’re sorry!”
“We’ll be better, won’t we?”
A chorus of ‘yes’s followed, and Yohji offered them an award-winning smile before nodding sagely, noting with some amusement that Aya was glaring at him for having dared suggest he had been hiding.
“Now, if you’re buying flowers, stay here and talk to our resident recluse,” he suggested, “and if not, come talk to me—especially if you’re over eighteen.”
Having drawn away a portion of the girls and in the process of stoking his ego by collecting offers of dates, Yohji kept an eye on Aya. The girls seemed to have taken his advice to heart and were keeping it down to a hush. The circle had backed off, and one at a time they approached Aya to ask for single flowers and, inevitably, to ask him some question or another.
Aya wasn’t responding to these, at all. He would go, get the flower, and hand it wordlessly over. And while there was a good deal of speculation amongst the girls, Yohji got the feeling that the boy’s reticence was not so much driving them away as driving them to plotting.
Soon enough, he saw the result of this initial planning as three girls approached together to ask for an actual arrangement. Two of them were actually brought to blushing when Aya looked up to listen to their order.
Yohji supposed it should be expected. Any of their group could garner a blush with some attention, himself being the most practiced and rewarded in this aspect, but it usually took a few words or at least a touch here or there. Aya was doing it with the simplicity of a look.
As he looked at the boy, it struck Yohji, not for the first time, that Aya wasn’t just exotic; he was almost…beautiful. And there were fast becoming fewer reservations to this statement: the hollows of his cheeks had filled out almost completely (with no roundness of face, but an appealing set of almost feminine angles), his striking eyes were no longer constantly shadowed by dark circles, his hands not so bone-thin. He was slight, but picking up muscle, quiet, but no longer with that obviously scared tremble about him. Yohji had no doubts that the boy was simply getting better at hiding some of his problems now that he had made the most basic recovery, but the picture from the outside was shockingly attractive.
And the girls were after him.
Yohji would have been worried, was, at the start, but Aya was dealing with them in a quiet way that (not given the information the blonde had) read as cold efficiency.
~*~
Aya went to the cooler, opened the door, and looked at the small bucket of roses. He took a deep breath and told himself again that all he had to do was get the flowers.
He was not going to shake. He was not going to hide. He was not going to think about anything else except getting those flowers.
He was going to be normal about the whole thing.
Taking out a single pink rose, he brought it back to the table and carefully snipped the stem and placed on a small capsule of water before wrapping it in a bit of green. He glanced, just to check his trajectory, at the waiting girl. She was looking expectantly at him, and Aya was quick to look back down.
He took another breath and reminded himself what Yohji had said. He didn’t have to let anyone but Yohji touch him. He didn’t have to let these people do anything to him. Aya clung to this knowledge as he pressed on with his task, glancing up often to make sure the blonde was still there.
~tbc~
Converting /tmp/php0hiBZU to /dev/stdout