Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ In The Shadows, In The Light ❯ Interlude 2 ( Chapter 4 )

Author's Notes: All Weiss Kreutz stuff/characters are not owned by me and all rights apply to the lucky bastards who do own them. I took these boys out to play and let them frolic like they really wanted to `cause that's the kinda sick and twisted little puppy I am.

 

Thanks goes to Race for beta-ing this for me and making me sound more polished than I am.

 

~ indicates character POV

** indicates internal conversation.

 

 

Interlude 2

 

~Brad~

 

The vision returned: Schuldig, Balinese and Abyssinian naked together in a big bed;

asleep and entangled. Balinese was in the middle and had laced his fingers with both Schuldig and Abyssinian; they all were touching in some way. They looked content and relaxed and the sheets were rumpled and untucked; their previous activities were obvious.

 

To say I was surprised would have been a vast understatement.

 

Not by what one would think: that Schuldig was consorting with the enemy; or even by the unavoidable conclusion that Schuldig was indulging himself with a man and not only one. I knew Schuldig swung both ways and it was in character for him not to limit his choices to one partner at a time.

 

I wasn't shocked to discover Balinese was sleeping with two men. I'd always had my suspicions about him anyway. It was the fact that Abyssinian was sleeping with both his team mate and Schuldig. I never would have thought that someone as repressed as Fujimiya would do a threesome; he struck me as too traditional for casual group sex.

 

Calling it a threesome didn't seem right; the vision had the flavour of something that was an on-going relationship with feelings attached. Now I knew what and who Schuldig was doing all those times he came home at the crack of dawn smelling of sex. It also explained why he got so snappish. Abyssinian and Balinese lived in the same house, worked together, and it could be assumed got together whenever they wanted. Schuldig's sudden attack on Abyssinian during the last mission became clear; in his own way Schuldig had been trying to save both his lover and me from harm.

 

Trust Schuldig to find a way to complicate matters. With the fall of Esset, attachments were being allowed to grow among us. We were becoming more like a family and less like a team. Esset had always been careful to keep that from happening, sending mental cleaners every so often to make sure that we functioned as a team only. Whenever we started to show signs of becoming friends; our minds were sanitized for our own protection.

I lost count of the times that had been done to us. The only reason I was even aware of it was my gift. The visions always showed me what had happened and what would happen; Esset had apparently never anticipated that. Very sloppy. At first, I was naturally bemused by images of relaxing in Schuldig's company or helping Nagi through some teenaged emotional issue or talking Farfarello down from one of his Esset induced insane moments.

 

When I eventually figured out what was being done to keep us as good little killer soldiers, I was furious. I knew when they were coming, but the one time I had tried to stop them went less than pleasantly for me. I was never sure how they knew that we were becoming more than just team mates. A group of people would just show up one day and I'd wake up in my bed feeling like I had missed something important. Schuldig would be more annoying than usual. Nagi would be quieter and more withdrawn and Farf…well Farf would be even more insane if that was possible.

 

But with the destruction of Esset, we hadn't had a visit from the cleaners in a good long while. We were starting to feel like a family again. A very disturbed and gifted family but a family none the less. Given time, I was sure that Schuldig, Nagi and Farf would remember all that they had been forced to forget. Of the three, I was most worried about Schuldig's reaction. While he had no problems screwing with somebody's mind, he was a terror when somebody tried it on him.

 

And now this. I trusted my visions. They had never led me wrong. Schuldig was sleeping with the enemy. I didn't care about that. As long as it didn't affect him on mission, I was glad that he had found someone, or two, to make him happy. We all deserved some happiness and his choice of two other assassins made sense. Who better to understand the shadows we lived in? But this wasn't a casual relationship that would be easily erased from his mind and it involved more than just us former members of Schwartz.

 

I hadn't had a vision of the cleaners coming for us yet. Esset was too scattered and broken; they might never get back to a position where they could enforce their will on us. I wasn't willing to bet on it, though. I would have to warn Schuldig before he found out on his own and did something stupid. I just hoped it would go better than the first time I tried. I still felt enormous guilt over that; the brain scrubbers had been brutal that time, not only to me but also to poor Schuldig. I had feared for Schuldig's sanity that day. Deliberately as a warning or inadvertently due to my gift, I retained the memory of every torturous thing they did that time, not only to Schuldig and me but to Nagi and Farf as well.

 

I was forced watch while the Esset agents wiped Schuldig's mind and they weren't gentle about it. It didn't help any that Schuldig had fought them with all he had. It took hours to finally break him enough mentally to scrub his memories. The cleaners had to actually work as a tag team to do it. Schuldig screamed like a wounded animal through the last forty minutes, until he had no voice left. When the agents were done, they beat Schuldig bloody. Because they could.

 

That was when I started to hate Esset.

 

The cleaners were only marginally gentler with Nagi, sparing him the post mind rape beating at least. I try not to even think about what they did to Farf. I know he wouldn't be nearly as crazy today if they hadn't continually mind wiped him as brutally as they always did. Just because he felt no pain physically didn't mean he felt no pain mentally.

 

After that, I was always careful to never give them any sign that I knew what they were doing. I never warned my team mates either. Perhaps it was cowardly of me but I couldn't bear to put people that I thought of as my wacky little family through that again. I learned my lesson; if we didn't struggle, it would be a lot less painful and over much quicker.

 

I learned to store my memories of the cleaners and my relationship with my team members deep in my head under my memories of my fifth birthday party at the circus or under the first time I danced with a girl and got a hard on. They weren't interested in those things and so never bothered to look closely. Carelessness on their parts but to be expected by a team who routinely did delicate psychic surgery with a sledgehammer. And I was willing to use whatever mistakes they made to my advantage.

 

I knew now that Schuldig had screwed with my vision that first time. I had been very confused over it since it had seemed to re-write itself between one moment and the next. I wasn't sure how he did it without me noticing but it was his gift and he had more Talent than Esset thought. I understood why he did it; I just wished he hadn't felt the need to try and hide this relationship from me. It was probably something left over from all the times the cleaners had been at his head: a deep, instinctual need to protect what he valued. I decided I would support him in this relationship of his; we had been friends several times between Esset's little tune ups.

 

I wanted us to be friends again.