Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Nerve ❯ One-Shot

"Nerve"
By Viridian5
2/26/03

RATING: NC-17; Schuldig/Farfarello, Schuldig/Crawford. If m/m interaction bothers you, pass this by.
SPOILERS: "Mission 12: Abschied -- Why," "Mission 13: Bruch -- Rain of Revenge," "Mission 18: Schuld -- Farfarello," "Mission 22: Miteid -- Final Reconciliation," "Mission 23: Schraube -- Everything for Love," and "Strafe."
SUMMARY: Destiny works in strange ways.
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere, as long as you ask me first.
FEEDBACK: can be sent to Viridian5@aol.com.
DISCLAIMERS: All things Weiß Kreuz belong to Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiß, Polygram k.k., and Animate Film. No infringement intended. These entities are far more disturbed than I am....
NOTES: Just wanted you to know that there’s blasphemy and murder here along with the sex. Last chance to turn back.
Some songs Crawford uses to mask his thoughts are "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears, "I Want It That Way" by Backstreet Boys, and "Genie in a Bottle" by Christina Aguilera. I’m sure you can imagine the rest. What I actually listened to while writing this story were Reanimation and Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park for aggression and helpful lyrics and Wither Blister Burn + Peel by Stabbing Westward for some more mood.
Daniel Paul Schreber and his theories are things I took from reality. He was a real-life schizophrenic whose 1903 memoir of his experience, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, details his delusions.
Kasha put the mental image in my head that led to the final sex scene. Thanks! I’d like to thank her and Kass for reading bits and goading me on as I went along.

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"Nerve"
By Viridian5
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I crossed my arms. "I don’t understand why I have to do this surveillance. Can’t you see if Weiß will arrive?"

"I don’t use my precognition to let you be lazy, Schuldig," Brad said as he read his paper, refusing to give me his full attention because he knew I hated getting anything less. He didn’t even need to read the fucking paper, not really.

"You haven’t seen anything at all then." He ran bad American pop songs through his mind as a screen over things he didn’t want me to read, and right now.... "I’ll hit you, baby, one more time." At least that tendency let me know when he had something he didn’t want me to know, even if I couldn’t read what it was.

I could break in and take the information, but that would involve crossing a line with him that would end our professional relationship. He would inevitably find out what I’d done, and there would be hell to pay. I still needed the team too much.

He smiled. "Go out and do your job. And take Farfarello."

"My day is looking up." You are... my fire / The one... desire.... "Fuck you, Brad Crawford, you sadist."

People got so bent over the thought of someone reading their minds, but it wasn’t like most of them even had anything going on that I’d bother with if I had a choice. As if I cared that Tsuzuki’s boss thought he was a waste of space or Akiko didn’t know if she’d be able to pay her rent this month. I didn’t want to be Tsuzuki or Akiko with their tiny heartbreaks, tiny terrors, and tiny problems, so mundane and boring. I’ve seen and heard a thousand, thousand Tsuzukis and Akikos. No one should be surprised that I felt the need to spice things up and really give people something to cry over.

I found Weiß more entertaining for the grander sweep of their problems, with their murdered girlfriends, friends, and families, destroyed innocence and careers, and all the blood on their hands. I barely had to do a thing to torture them, since they tortured themselves. Not that I ever avoided an opportunity to mess with them and their friends and family to fuck them over more.

If people didn’t want their thoughts read, they shouldn’t shove them at me with all of their "somebody understand me, if only someone knew how I felt, somebody help me." I understand and know you all, and you don’t deserve my help.

You don’t want my help. Trust me.

Farfarello’s internal problems and concerns had a Biblical scale and a heavy tinge of blood, but his thoughts turned circles like a Catherine wheel before breaking apart and impaling onlookers on spikes. Oh, nice metaphor there. Damn, I knew far too much about the lives and deaths of saints. And everyone who had taught him the masses in Latin should be shot, since he sometimes switched to that in his head and it made mine hurt. At least Sister Ruth, his mother, had already died for her part in that. In any case, sitting in a car on surveillance meant that he couldn’t use messy violence as an outlet, so his thoughts just kept viciously cycling, and I sat too close to him and knew him too well to effectively shut him out unless I concentrated on doing that alone. God, blood, death, mother, God, betrayal, sin, pain, God, blood, death, mother....

I couldn’t take it anymore. "Have you ever heard of Daniel Paul Schreber?" I asked. I doubted he had.

"No."

"At the end of the 19th century, he thought he’d glimpsed the true nature of God and creation. Every living thing is connected to God through nerves, and the soul itself is contained in the nerves of the body. God is all nerve and sits at the center of this network, but He doesn’t deal directly with the living. Instead, He devours the nerves of the dead, hungrily slurping them like noodles to gain knowledge and experience." Unable to help myself, I made a slurping noise. Something about Farfie always made me tell these things like campfire stories, with drama and effects. You know, like ‘the kids were fucking on the backseat of the car and heard a noise at the door, and it was GOD standing there!’ I had to entertain myself. "God cannot untangle Himself from His creation, nor we from Him."

People also seemed to think that telepathy ended the need for speech. Idiots. If you had a long knife and a short knife, would you decide only to use the long one? Each had their purposes. My talking directed my target’s thoughts and provided a foundation for my work, and I enjoyed forcing people to listen to me mix truth and lies as I spoke their worst fears at them as if grinding lit cigarettes into their flesh. Hearing their private thoughts spoken aloud by a stranger scared the hell out of them in a way that never ceased to entertain me.

Besides, people didn’t like having voices in their heads. Schreber knew all about that. I knew all about that.

I could only see the side of Farfarello’s face that had the eyepatch, and I was very specifically not reading his mind, so I couldn’t tell his reaction to my little history lesson until he said, "Was this Schreber insane before or after he had this grotesque revelation?"

I smiled. "Before, during, and after, actually. He was an institutionalized schizophrenic. He also had the impression that his body was being mutilated and he was being transformed into a woman."

"Is that how we seem to you, Schuldig? As only nerves to be slurped like noodles?"

"You all have flesh too." Oh, yeah. Join Schwarz for the anarchistic mayhem. Stay for the surreal conversation.

Farfarello turned to face me and licked his lips. "Flesh is useful."

A sudden wave of images and sense pictures of how he found flesh useful made me lightheaded. What a catalogue of bloody horrors he had. I’d seen everything in my life, so I wasn’t squeamish, but experiencing these things from the point of view of a connoisseur added an extra disturbing edge. I give this disemboweling a 10, but I can’t dance to it.... Then the wave and lusts on display changed to show other ways flesh could be useful.

Oh, fuck. 1] Farfarello was deliberately trying to communicate with me. 2] Farfarello wanted me right now. Which might mean that 3] this was his idea of what wooing me involved.

I’d known that he wanted me in his own tangled way. I just hadn’t known it with the swamp of feeling attached, with a low pulse of desire attaching itself to my groin.

If Brad had foreseen this for today, I would kill him.

"Some people believe that the dictate against men lying with men was added by a translator and is not an original part of the Bible," I gasped.

"And some believe that Mary became the virgin mother because someone mistranslated a term for ‘young woman’ into ‘virgin.’" He sounded very calm, and his mind ran like clockwork, all cycling gears. "Not everything I do revolves around denouncing God. My life would be pathetic if it did, and He would win."

I was not going to touch that. "I’d rather not see if I’m the first lover you have who survives the experience. I’m not into being bit or ripped into, and I don’t like doing that to my partners either." I was the ultimate victim of too much information.

I preferred to leave sadism out of my sex life, since sex tended to mesh me too deeply into my partner’s experience.

"I know. I break bodies, but you prefer to break minds and spirits."

"I like to kill too."

"Yeah." He kept smiling, something he usually did when he had mayhem in mind or when he was licking one of his knives. "You entertain me. Isn’t that love?"

Laugh or cry? I could take the third option of running away screaming. No, I couldn’t. Farfarello didn’t respect weakness, he would see flight as weakness, and that would make me prey, in his way of seeing things.

"I’m not interested." The next wave overwhelmed me, and I couldn’t help arching my back under it. Lust, hands, mouth, touch, what he’d do to me.... I shut him out hard and gave him a telepathic smack so painful that it made even him cry out. "You will never do that again."

Damn him and Brad for having such a good idea of how my telepathy worked.

Farfarello looked oddly like a whipped puppy. A badly scarred, whipped street puppy, but mournful nonetheless. His mind stuttered, as if I’d thrown a wrench into the wheels, making them grind. "Your hair looks soft," he said, which would have seemed a non sequitur to someone who wasn’t a telepath.

He wouldn’t really be able to feel that softness. He enjoyed pain, but he didn’t experience that as deeply as normal people did either. That lack of sensation made him a dangerous fighter and led to his heights of self-mutilation. He’d killed his last lovers out of frustration that they’d failed to make him feel pleasure.

"You could make me feel," Farfarello said, trusting that I’d gotten all of that. He lightly stroked a bit of my long hair and felt almost nothing from it.

If Weiß showed up and slipped past us because we were too busy having a conversation about sex, Brad would never let us hear the end of it, even if it did give him a good laugh in private.

I would never be able to excise Farfarello’s wanting for me through telepathy, because human minds were just too complex and tangled. His lust and fascination would thread through too many areas for me to be able to snip them all. It was far easier to successfully add ideas to a mind than delete from it.

"If I gave you a taste of feeling, would you leave me the fuck alone?"

Something flickered in his one tawny eye. "For the rest of the surveillance."

"Honesty. How refreshing."

"You could read my mind and see a lie."

I unclenched my fingers from the steering wheel, took off my gloves, and reached for a handful of my orange-red hair. I took pride in its bright distinctiveness and loved the stares it got me. It was one of the ways I screamed "I’m not you!" at the world without saying a word. I petted it, closing my eyes to better concentrate on only feeling, and passed it to Farfarello for a while, the softness, the texture of the long, individual strands. Then I disengaged and put my shields up.

"Nnnnh," Farfarello gasped, with his head resting face down against my shoulder and his hands gripping my arm.

"If you fuck up my leather, I’ll... give you a weird fetish or something." Maybe I could induce a mad passion for Hello Kitty merchandise. Then again, any passion for Hello Kitty merchandise had to be mad. The character was like a frightening giant head with dots, ears, and whiskers.

I could just about hear his inner clockworks grinding as he rubbed his white-haired head against my black leather-clad shoulder. I was going to make him like Hello Kitty and Pochacco, that puppy thing character. Serve him right.

Somebody walking near the car sneered over the two gaijin making such an obscene public display in their car. I gave him the compulsion to tell his wife about the affair he was having with a co-worker and the stash of gay porn pictures he’d downloaded off the Internet.

"That was... that was...." Farfarello said, his voice sounding rougher and more damaged than usual.

"The best sex you never had?" I’d lay odds that my act of sharing had made things worse. No good deed goes unpunished.

Then I tasted a familiar mind amidst the background babble and impressions, tasted closed-in spaces, fire, metal, rasp of a whetstone, blood, rain, flowers.... Aya Fujimiya. Once I noticed him, I could feel the other kittens arriving like a shout. "Weiß is here," I said aloud and sent to Crawford and Nagi.

Farfarello pulled away and knuckled his eye. I ignored the tear track on his face for the peace of both of our minds. He said, "Then let’s welcome them."

The man who’d been disgusted by us ran in terror when he saw us getting out of the car, Farfarello with his blades ready and me with my gun. I sent a bullet after him out of perversity but made sure I didn’t hit him, since him dying or being wounded might get in the way of his ruining his life later when he spoke to his wife. Teach him to judge other people. Farfarello smiled savagely, approving.

The fight with Weiß mostly went how our fights tended to go, with us beating the shit out of each other while Crawford taunted them with words, hints, his foresight, his asskicking ability, and his calm inscrutability. Pretty much the way Brad treated everybody, though he didn’t let loose the asskicking on Schwarz. At least, not very often. We could be an unruly, stubborn crew, and sometimes he lost patience.

Okay, there had been some differences in the fight. I missed being able to taunt Aya about his sister. He didn’t feel as angry now, but the ice that replaced it didn’t seem healthier. Surprise, surprise, that the man could get everything he’d wanted and still be an unhappy ticking time bomb. I could spend a week trying to untangle his fucked-up mind. He’d be so upset if I fixed him. Ken seemed troubled too, with a bullet-riddled bleached blond guy at the heart of the trouble. So many gifts I had to defer.

I allowed myself to plant a suggestion for a new hairdo and costume in Yoji’s head, though, which I’d have to see if he took. The bodypaint would be an especially nice touch.

Eventually it all wound down, and we took off. Someday Weiß would wonder why we hadn’t just killed them yet. Someday. Then again, they could be thick, so maybe they would never think about it in time.

All the way back Farfarello stared at me. I didn’t want to read his thoughts, because the feelings I saw in his eye freaked me out enough, thanks. And all the while Brad’s mind went through bubblegum pop’s greatest hits even as he exuded smugness.

"Schuldig, what were you doing when you called us?" Nagi asked as we reached our little headquarters.

"What?"

"It felt really strange."

I heard "Genie in a Bottle" from the other end of the room. "Nagi, Farfie, it would be really nice if you could leave so I could have a nice conversation with Crawford."

Farfarello stopped idly drawing on his arm with a knife tip and walked out without a word. I caught the vague impression of him wanting to take his confusion out on the world. Again.

Nagi had some psi aside from telekinesis even if he didn’t like to use it, and from the look on his face he felt some of what I was bleeding off. I briefly wondered if psi-sensitives in the area were getting migraines from my rage. I hoped so.

"Fine," Nagi said and went to his room. And locked the door.

Brad kept smiling. "Where are your gloves?" he asked me.

"You fucker. You saw this happening and made sure it happened. You played with us."

He pushed his glasses up his nose, doing his schoolteacher routine. "It was coming. If not today, later. At least here I knew Weiß would show before something messy occurred."

"Messy? Messy? You thought that wasn’t messy? Do you foresee me blasting your brain so hard that you’ll spend the rest of your life as a fucking vegetable?"

"No, I don’t. You need us, Schu. You need me. The other possibilities for Farfarello coming out to you might have been worse."

"But we’ll never know now, will we?" The pop parade slipped a bit, letting me see him remember his vision of how I’d looked while writhing in the grip of Farfarello’s obscene thought show. Brad had liked that.... "Messy. You saw it. You didn’t feel it. You wanna?"

Brad looked slightly nervous in that special Brad way other people wouldn’t notice. "No."

"You sure? It’s not every day you get to feel and see lust from inside a lunatic’s mind."

"I didn’t foresee this."

"And that makes it okay?" I could feel that I wasn’t making much of an impression. Precogs got too twisted up by having a power that made them right so often. "You know, Esset did a few experiments with me and concluded that I’m subconsciously influenced by the company I keep. I’m skeptical, but it might be interesting to see what I turn into if I get deeply involved with Farfarello." I reached the door. "I’m leaving. I figure I’ll track Farfie down and fuck him until he finds a new religion, then we’ll come back and slice you into cold cuts for playing with us."

"You won’t do anything like that."

"Yeah? You see that? Crawford? Brad?"

He’d stiffened, and his head jerked up a little. Most of the time his brain processed his visions too quickly for me to read, but I could sometimes catch splinters of the longer ones. This time I only caught glimpses of me, blood, and stained glass, maybe 2% of the total package.

"Brad?" I asked.

His eyes cleared, and we were back to pop music. "I’m fine, Schu," he said too emphatically.

Why bother? I turned my head. And something hit me.

I came to in a straitjacket. With a leash attached that would keep me from straying too far from my bed. "Crawford! You fuck--"

The door banged in, splinters flying. Farfarello had kicked it in. "Who did you kill?" he asked. Yeah, Brad tended to strap Farfie up when Farfie’s murderous wrath took too high a body count of nuns and priests. Brad probably thought I’d be thankful he hadn’t hung me upside-down as well.

"I shot off my mouth, plus he foresaw something." While Farfarello sat behind me on the bed unfastening buckles and sawing through straps, I asked, "How did you know?"

"I heard you." He hated seeing me like this. "He put you in one of my straitjackets."

It would so ruin my reputation for cool if I started screaming, but what he’d done made sense. Not even Brad had an endless supply of straitjackets just in case.

"He’d seen something." As soon as the straitjacket had loosened enough, I ripped it off and flung it at the wall. I’d spent too much time in these fucking things in my past. People who heard voices were crazy, you know?

Farfarello handed me one of his weapons. He didn’t give one to just anybody. "When I’m upset, it helps me feel better to kill things," he said solemnly.

I popped the blade and then spun and flipped the thing around, not as smoothly as Farfarello would have, but telepathy didn’t give muscle memory. In fact, I nicked a finger doing it. As I sucked on it, I murmured, "This is my body, this is my blood."

He pressed closer to my back, a tightly clinging shadow. I could feel his smile.

Murder usually wasn’t this... meaty for me. I shot people or made them shoot each other. Being able to smell so much blood on me made things feel more immediate. I flipped the knife in my hand, getting better at it each time, then licked its blade. Eh. Still not my thing.

I hadn’t been dragged along by someone else’s mind this far or for this long for a while, but I couldn’t really regret it. Farfarello felt an intense clarity and power while doing these ideological kills, and I’d felt them too as I’d killed with him. Besides, our victims’ terror had tasted so sweet.

When I stood, I had to close my eyes against the colored light streaming warmly across my face in blue, red, yellow, and white. Farfarello had chosen a truly beautiful church.

"You’re not all that good with a knife," Farfarello said.

"I’m far better with a gun, while you’re the one who shot that Ouka girl while aiming for Omi."

"It was a difficult shot."

"Then you shouldn’t have tried it. I was whacked repeatedly across the head with a golf club over that."

"Reiji hit me too."

"You were the one who actually shot his daughter. Ouka. What kind of name is ‘Ouka’ anyway?"

"I suppose you prefer the ones from your homeland, where people can’t say a word without making it sound like they’re clearing their throats."

I opened my eyes and turned to look at him. "Are you bantering with me?"

He almost bounced a little as he moved, since after his little murder sprees he felt as close to high as he ever got. And it made him happy to share this with me. "Do you like it?"

"Hell, yeah."

The light painted pure color into his white hair. I saw myself through his eye, bloody and radiant.

He stepped over a body and put his hand up to shade my eyes from all the light pouring in through the stained glass. Everything was so pretty, so full of depth, right now. Then I realized that I kept seeing partially through Farfarello’s one eye. After that, my own normal vision seemed so much more special.

He moved in close. "I never thought to quote parts of the mass in Latin at them. They seemed to find it unnerving."

"They’re modern clergy, so they don’t understand the Latin. It only sounded arcane to them."

"It might be your accent. It’s appalling."

"Yours isn’t?"

"My accent is beautiful."

"I was using your accent."

He circled me, slowly moving in closer with each revolution, working his way up to touching me. "What religion were you born into, Schu?"

"Why? You gonna kill me for it?"

"No. Just curious."

"Lutheran. Or Communist. Dunno. A lot of shit got buried or lost when my brain turned on and tuned in. I’ve been everything. Doesn’t matter."

Actually, I’d lied a bit, since the truth was a little more complicated. I actually remembered too much, since I had several street kid childhoods, male and female, in my memory to choose from. Only the bit about being thrown out of my home for turning telepathic let me know which one actually belonged to me, and if I followed that long enough and weeded out the memories that didn’t belong I’d know what religion I’d been born into. I just didn’t care enough to make the effort.

Farfarello breathed on my neck. "Want you."

His lust stoked my own, but.... "Fucking at the scene of the crime might be asking for trouble."

"A pity. Your hair contrasts so nicely with the altar cloths."

A part of me that came from someone else was appalled, while I just felt amused. A little blasphemy added spice to life. But now that the gleeful killing haze had passed from me and Farfarello, the church started to weigh down on me. Focused faith and worship and boredom over decades or centuries left their mark, and I could feel them in the thick air. Old places devoted to specific purposes messed with espers. Train stations made me a bit manic, while airports could sometimes put me to sleep.

"I know where we can go," Farfarello said.

He led me outside and around the back of the church to an overgrown, untended grotto, then pressed me against the church wall. Its cold radiated into my back, even through my coat. I could feel his lust and excitement as if they were my own but mine never seemed so red.

"Make me feel," he sighed against my neck as he pressed himself against my body.

I took off my gloves, smiling at the way his gaze followed my hands in anticipation. Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. As we kissed I let him feel the hard drive of his body against mine and the dry roughness of his lips.

"You don’t take good care of yourself," I said against his cheek, making him twitch as he felt his face against my lips through my mind. When I kissed his other cheek, I tongued one of the strings of his eyepatch just because I knew he’d get a kick out of the thought of that.

"No reason to."

"You think God cares if your lips are chapped?"

"Am I supposed to make myself pretty for you now?"

"I have to get something out of this." I ran my hands through his close-cropped white hair, surprised by how good it felt. It couldn’t be called soft by any stretch of the imagination, but it had an intriguing texture. I shared it with him. When I plucked at the earrings in his right ear, he almost felt something like pain, which made him purr. He ran his mouth along the line of my throat, but when I felt the skim of teeth I smacked his nose. "No biting, no marking."

He shook his head like a dog. "Sorry. Instinct. You smell so good...." I smelled like him, bloody and sharp with sweat and excitement.

I sighed as he opened my coat and shirt, his fingers hot and the air cold against my bared skin. Nice to know that he could do this as well as he could take people apart. He knew what to do. He just didn’t know why people liked it.

I’d plugged into him enough that a feedback loop started between us quickly and easily. He could feel himself grinding against me and tried to find ways to heighten my pleasure to heighten his pleasure. He was drunk on it, awestruck, and that made me feel so powerful, and I shared that.... "Magus," he murmured or thought.

Usually I could feel my partner’s pleasure to the point where my body had to take over by instinct as my mind drowned and lost track of where my sensations ended and my lover’s began, but Farfarello felt only pressure. It gave me boundaries and made me aware of myself in ways I hadn’t been before. It gave me less physical feeling, but the emotions, the power.... Farfarello’s eagerness and amazement were helping me get off.

Blood tasted different, richer, to him than it did to me. He licked my face clean. As I ran my hands along his arms, I let him feel the texture of the seamed skin there and the bandages he wrapped around the wounds he inflicted on himself.

I felt my usual shields disintegrating a bit as my concentration melted from the sex, so I staved off the invading thoughts by focusing on Farfarello and our bodies and the cold wall I kept rubbing my head and back against. I could still feel the church’s faith fingerprints through the stone.

"You’re so sensitive...." he whispered. His fingers clenched on my hips, which grounded me. Then he knelt at my feet. "In worship," he said, which made me smirk.

I stopped smirking once he had my pants undone and my cock at the tip of his tongue. He licked it as if it were one of his blades, lingeringly and lovingly. Then he went all the way down on me, deep throating. Fuck, such a wonderfully tight fit. I gripped his hair to pull him closer, the texture of it further sensitizing my skin, and he made a sound of approval that felt so damned good as it vibrated around my cock and that felt even better as I felt him feel it.

"Is this how you ruined your voice, doing this?" I gasped.

Fuck off, Schuldig. That’s what I’m trying to do, Farfie....

He pulled me closer, as if trying to suck me into himself completely, and put his hands into my pants and ran them down my ass, then gripped. And hummed around my cock. I came and took him with me, our pleasure blazing with hot stained glass colors. He rushed to his feet, almost on a bounce, and rocked against me, humming, still high on the echoes of the feelings and sensations I’d given him.

Finally, he stilled and just kept me pressed to the wall, his clockwork mind in disarray. He didn’t know what to think. To be sure of him, I had my gun in hand and pointed its barrel between his eyes, resting it against his forehead. "I have no intention of dying," I said.

His laughter sounded a bit like a car engine trying to turn over on a cold morning, and he ran his fingers down the gun barrel in a suggestive way. The gears in his brain settled. "You don’t have to worry. You’re now one of the safest people alive. Anyone who wants to hurt you has to go through me first."

"You’re my Black Knight?"

He looked confused, then said, "Yeah. They could rip my arms and legs off, and I would still fight."

Unbelievable. "What did you think of the holy hand grenade?"

"Very funny. Most of the movie bored me, though."

"Brad’s coming." Damn. I put my gun down but kept it out.

"Him too?"

I almost choked. I’d always known Farfarello had a sense of humor, but he rarely shared it out loud.

"I want to give him a show," I said.

Farfarello pressed closer, radiating warmth. "He doesn’t get to see you." He had one of his knives ready.

Of course he’d be possessive. I was the only one who could give him this. Caught up in carnage and lust, I hadn’t been thinking earlier, but it was much too late for regrets now. It might have been inevitable anyway. Hell, he’d probably been set on this path the moment he’d met me.

Talking to Brad should be fun.

As Brad walked up, looking neat and formal as usual, he let me see us through his eyes. Farfarello and I looked utterly debauched, with me especially appearing to have had a sex and murder orgy. How had Farfie missed that patch of blood near my ear? Snuggled together, we had the same smile on our faces.

Brad had seen me like this earlier and walloped me for it in an effort to prevent it. Thus causing that very future. Ha!

Maybe Farfarello realized that too somehow, because he said, "Crawford, I would like to thank you. If you hadn’t put Schuldig in a straitjacket, this might have never happened." Then he licked that last bit of blood from my face.

One of Brad’s eyes twitched, but he said, "You’re in Kyoto."

"Are we?" I drawled.

"Yeah," Farfarello said.

"Thanks for the newsflash, Brad. We went to Kyoto because Farfarello has already torn through most of Tokyo’s clergy."

"Fresh start," Farfarello said.

"We considered going to Yokohama, but it was too close to Tokyo."

Brad was pissed off but didn’t show it. "I didn’t know what church to go to just from my vision. Nagi had to find you. I’m sure he found it educational."

"He was a street kid. I doubt he saw anything he hadn’t seen before."

"I have one Farfarello. I don’t need another. I do need a Schuldig."

"I’m blushing," I answered.

"That seems to be impossible." He shook his head. "I don’t see a future for you."

It used to scare the shit out of me when he’d say that until I realized that seeing nothing for me could just mean that nothing was coming to him at all or that the probabilities hadn’t settled yet. "Crawford, you put me in a straitjacket. If an actual assignment comes up, you can contact me. Otherwise, fuck off."

"It’s your funeral."

"Would you like me to break him for you, Schuldig?" Farfarello asked.

"No. I still need him."

"Keep that in mind," Crawford said.

"For now," I continued.

Brad kept a pissy look on his face as he left us alone. I hoped he remembered this the next time he started thinking that seeing bits of the future made him God.

Farfarello breathed on my neck. "Alone again."

It annoyed me that he already assumed that he owned me. "I’m not always in the mood--stop laughing at that in your head--and I won’t always want to share what I’m feeling. It’s work giving you stuff."

He backed away and tilted his head, giving me a considering look.

I answered him, "This is not Crawford’s influence at work; I can resist you all on my own. I am not cranky. I can get sex from anybody I want. Yeah, it’s nice that all of your torture experience has given you a gift for finding people’s sensitive spots, but I can live without it. And you’d have to get used to what I’m doing now, because the more entangled we get the easier it is for me to read your mind, and I don’t even want to."

I could lose myself in him, and I sure as hell didn’t want to.

"Stop smiling at me," I said.

I started to fasten myself up since I felt cold with the sun setting and evening chill coming, but Farfarello just let himself hang out. He didn’t feel the temperature change, and he was an optimist.

"An optimist?" I asked. I mean, really.

He smiled, all teeth, and put his hand on mine over my fly. "I would surround you with luxury."

Being nice, I didn’t yank his hand away. "And set me on a mountaintop and offer me all the kingdoms of the world?"

"We already own the world."

"The world just doesn’t know it yet."

"Yeah. I’m not afraid of your power."

"You fucking well should be."

"If you hurt me, it’s good. If you pleasure me, it’s good."

"If I withdraw from you totally, it sucks beyond the telling?" The worst thing I could do to him was give him nothing: no pleasure, no pain, no talk. I had the power here.

And here we had another example of how useful talk could be. Talking forced people to organize and articulate their thoughts, to the point where they sometimes figured out things about themselves they hadn’t realized before. Made my job a hell of a lot easier to have the revelations handed to me on a platter instead of having to hunt them down piece by piece and put ‘em together myself.

Farfarello stared at me and breathed. His brain just buzzed. I hated the way it felt. This happened sometimes, with him going someplace I couldn’t find.

Could I withdraw and refuse to meddle? Have I ever been able to?

"You’ll start to resent me, if you haven’t already," I said. "I have too much power here."

I felt a spike of horror that wasn’t mine or his. "Schuldig?" Farfarello asked. Why did he ask? Oh, I’d turned my head to follow the spike. Hadn’t realized that. Then I felt a sharp snap and started to laugh. Too fucking funny.... "What?" he asked.

"An old woman discovered our handiwork. And promptly had a heart attack."

"You mustn’t tease me like that." His tone said that he punished teasing.

"Fuck no, zucker. She saw all of the horror of our little murder tableau, then...." I clutched at my chest and made a face.

He smiled. "I want to see. Show me."

"There’s nobody alive there to look at her through, and we’re not heading back in. We’re done tempting fate."

"I can’t stay to see if anything happens to the person who finds her?"

"No."

"Is she still alive?"

"For now."

"I wonder if her God will save her?" he asked maliciously.

"Unless two foreign Samaritan types call for medical help, probably not."

"That’s not God."

"I’m told He works in mysterious ways."

"He doesn’t work at all. I don’t see two foreign Samaritan types at the scene to help her, do you?" He tucked himself in and fastened up--which I appreciated, since his dick swaying around had been distracting--then asked, "You’re hungry, aren’t you?"

"Yeah."

"I felt it before. Maybe we can find a place that sells noodles."

How could I resist when he was being so cute and ingratiating and starting to walk away from the scene of the crime?

We did find a place that sold noodles. The woman who seated us gave Farfarello another big smile as she walked away. "What did you do, Schuldig?" he asked.

"Me? I don’t always do things."

"No one ever looks at me like that."

"I may have tweaked her perceptions a little." I smiled. "Everyone in the restaurant thinks you have two eyes and can’t see your scars. The women and a few of the men think you’re cute, but dressed so roughly, a pretty boy trying to be bad. It’s a shame you’re so obviously taken by the lady with you."

His laugh could have been a cough. "Even if you were a woman, you couldn’t be a lady."

"I’m offended."

"It doesn’t seem to be flashy enough for you."

I smiled. "I’m a very pretty lady."

"Do you play these games every time we go out?"

"No, since a lot of the time I like the stares we get. Just sometimes. I need to stay sharp, and it keeps me amused."

"You’re playing with the whole room at once?"

I didn’t have a willing audience to listen to me talk about myself very often. I appreciated the novelty. "It’s not that hard. People don’t expect people to come in with scars and an eyepatch. They expect two eyes. It’s only a small push, and they provide the rest for me. Once I let people think I’m a woman, they contribute a woman’s voice for me on their own. The waitress thinks I speak with a low alto. With my hair--"

"And prettiness."

"--a lot of times it’s a toss-up whether someone behind me can guess my gender right anyway."

"I want to see you."

I gave it to him. My woman self had been adapted from my own appearance, just a little more delicate looking, less broad, and with a nice rack. I still kept my height and some breadth of shoulder--I was a German girl--and my black leather coat looked like it had been tailored to fit. I didn’t suit the tastes of most of the men in the restaurant, not with how strong and aggressive I looked. Fuck ‘em. They didn’t know what they were missing. I was appealing to people who liked a bit of the exotic, though.

"You’re pretty this way too," he said. "The red lipstick might be a bit much."

"I have the coloring to pull it off." My other self had a little bit of eyeliner on and a hint of blush too in colors that worked with my pale skin and orange-red hair. My nail polish color matched my lips.

I’ve been a woman often enough to have given this some thought. I wouldn’t want to look like a dog.

"Scarlet diva...." He took my hand. "It feels bigger than it looks."

"I didn’t expect to get felt up by anyone, so why bother?"

"Not even by me?"

I gave him my best demure look, which he found hilarious. He couldn’t laugh, but it kept trying to explode out of him. Hopefully our waitress wouldn’t come back and think he was having a seizure.

"Do they think we’re married?" he finally asked when he recovered.

"We’re so young. Most of them figure we’re dating." When he kissed my fingers, I said, "I didn’t figure you for public displays of affection."

"We’re young, we’re pretty, we’re foreigners. Why not? Do they think we’re tourists?" He seemed to relish the playacting. Who would have guessed?

"They want to, but our fluency in their native tongue is tripping them up. Do you want to see what you look like to them?"

"Not really." He teased my fingertips with his rough lips and little flicks of his tongue. Demure was getting harder to pull off. It wasn’t the only thing getting harder.

Disapproval. Annoyance. Our waitress. I loved waitstaff, since they fed my sadism without me having to do a thing to them. Poor bastards led such miserable lives. I suspected that Aya Fujimiya had started honing his hatred and misanthropy during his past experience working in a restaurant. After all, not everyone responded to his parents’ murder and sister’s victimization by becoming an assassin. It usually needed some kind of prior push.

I ordered noodles. I felt Farfarello smile against my fingers. He was still so wrapped in my telepathic suggestion that he almost tasted my illusory nail polish. Some imagination he had. Maybe I should be jealous of the girl he appeared to be making out with.

In her head, the waitress snarled about sluts who led poor boys astray. I’d have to share that with Farfie later.

Women could be so cruel to one another.

I flirted with him the whole time we were there just to rub it in. Mine, bitch.

We walked right past the bouncer at the club. Once we were inside, I let us go visible looking like ourselves. No mind tricks.

"I don’t understand the appeal of this," Farfarello said.

"What? I feel better already." The thunder of the music fed my chaos and aggression. People came to clubs to get drunk, stoned, and laid, which I thoroughly felt and approved of. Peace and order and Zen? Fuck them. Let me be somewhere I could have my surroundings match the inside of my head.

I watched people either notice Farfarello and take immediate interest or notice him and try not to notice him again. His scars and bandages marked him out as being more serious than most people who did the pain thing are.

I saw a nice table in the back, already taken, and walked over. "You’ll change tables," I told the two guys sitting there. "I want this one."

"Fuck you," one of them said.

I’d asked. "You know that girl at the bar was giving you the eye. Why don’t you give her what she wants and buy her a drink?" I directed it to both their puny minds. They stood up like obedient little drones, neither noticing the other moving, and walked toward the bar. I sat down and leaned back.

Farfarello sat across from me. "I assume you have your reason for that."

"Wait for it." I breathed out as I felt them both make their move at once. "They just realized that they both went for the same girl at once. They’re pissed at each other. And her. She’s with her psycho boyfriend, who just had his boss shit on him all day long. He’s really pissed. At them and his girlfriend, who didn’t protest as vehemently as he wanted her to. He just punched one of the two out, and the guy fell into another guy. Now that guy is throwing punches. More people are getting involved. One girl just had a froofy drink spilled all over her dress, but it’s actually her sister’s dress, which she wasn’t supposed to borrow. Hell, she isn’t even supposed to be out tonight. Once her sister sees it, she’ll tell their parents, and there will be hell to pay. I doubt it’ll be that bad, but she’s fucking terrified. One guy just got his jaw broken. A brawl has started."

I clenched my hands against the table, buzzed, high. Once you’ve tasted anger, terror, despair, and pain, nothing else will ever be as sweet.

Farfarello moved my right hand aside and sat on my lap on top of my hard cock, facing me. "I never realized just how much you get off on misery." He put his hands at the sides of my head, as if he could figure out what made me tick that way.

I did a little roll of my hips under him. "The great thing is that all I had to do is give a little push and the rest falls on its own. A ten-year friendship died because one of the guys I pushed remembers that the other one makes more money and seems to think he deserves everything, while the other remembers that his friend is a self-righteous prick. Psycho boyfriend doesn’t feel like his girlfriend protested enough, so he dumps her. She’s actually found him joyless and scary lately, so she doesn’t mind."

"Didn’t you do her a favor, then?"

"She always falls for assholes, and she’s starting to become aware of it. Yet she can’t change, and she’s starting to despair. Next one will be more of the same, I guarantee. The guy at the bar who got his jaw broken isn’t supposed to be here, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to tell his wife.

"I just give a tiny push, and they all fuck up their lives on their own. It’s like tagging, graffiti, my way of carving my mark into the world. Besides, it’s fun." Somewhere in the near distance, glass broke against flesh. I drank it all in.

He let go of my head and rocked atop me a little, smiling as I hissed. "It’s more than that."

"Yeah. Esset did a little study on me. They found out that I get an endorphin rush from other people’s dark emotions, but they couldn’t explain why it all tastes so good. Somebody fucked up while putting me together." Though Esset would have loved to replicate my reactions in their other telepaths if they could have figured out how I worked.

"No, you are exactly what God meant you to be," he whispered against my lips. "If you were one of the saved, it would eat you alive that it feels so good to do such bad things."

"But I’m far from salvation."

"Fortunately for you."

"Fortunately for you too, because I’m in a generous mood." I kissed him and let him feel it all, the high, the lust, the different varieties of sweetness each brand of misery had. He shuddered hard and clenched his hands on my arms, lost, overwhelmed, thrilled. I slowly closed him out a bit, leaving him with just the edge of it.

"It’s over?" he panted.

"No. I just didn’t think you could take much more."

"How do you take it?"

"You get used to it." And need a little more to get the same old rush the next time. "Besides, usually I’m prepared for what I get." I laughed as the psycho boyfriend pounded a bouncer’s head into the bar. "This time I aimed for four people and nailed a crowd." Fuck, I felt so high.... "Somebody called the cops."

"We should leave."

"We can’t leave. Psycho boyfriend is going for the gold. He’s snapping. I have to see if he finally kills somebody."

"It’s my turn to be the responsible one."

"You gotta be kidding me."

"No."

"I’m too fucking hard to walk away."

"Fine." Farfarello slid off me, opened my pants, and sucked me down. I came as much from surprise as from the hot, wet suction. Pop, fizz, done. I’d never been so quickly and efficiently blown in my life. "Now can we go?" he asked as he tucked my cock back in and fastened my pants.

"That--" Sucked, I wanted to say. "That wasn’t even fun." It only took the edge off. My body kept trying to figure out where the rest of the sex was.

"Later. Up."

"It better be good."

"It will be."

"Fine. But I want a drink first." Farfarello picked up a nearby man’s drink and glared at him when he tried to protest. I asked, "Do I look like the froofy drink type?"

He looked annoyed. "I don’t know how to tell." He set the drink back down on the table hard, letting it slosh.

"I’ll get it." I picked up one woman’s vodka with lemon on the way out and gave her a telepathic smack when she tried to protest. I was dying for a beer, but I hated all the brands here.

We gracefully sidestepped the combatants. In punishing two guys who wouldn’t give me their table, I’d plunged the entire club into chaos.

Cool.

The clean night air slapped me as we walked outside. I wanted to go back inside with the smoke, alcohol, and violence. But then the physical distance muffled the misery, so I could think again. Damn, I’d lost it, and in front of Farfarello. Brad always figured that I was out of control, but actually my whole life was about control: getting it and keeping it. I was just out of his control. But as good as playtime was, when it made you stupid, it’s a bad thing. Somebody could’ve slit my throat in there and I would have smiled the whole time.

Farfarello hadn’t enjoyed my little demonstration much, since he needed to have his carnage where he could see, taste, touch, smell, and hear it. Having only five senses could be so limiting.

"Schu." Farfarello leaned against my car, knowing that it annoyed me. Sports cars aren’t meant to be leaned on. "I promised you luxury."

I knocked back my vodka. "You did."

"Choose a hotel. An expensive one."

Telepathy made some things easier. Choosing a good place to stay for the night was one of those things. But.... "A really good hotel is a bit rich for my blood. I tend to live beyond my means."

"I’ll pay."

"You’ll pay?"

He smiled darkly. "Schuldig, what do I do with my money?"

Good question. He didn’t enjoy or care about much of anything. "Buy a new knife now and then?"

"I like the ones I have."

He was an independently wealthy ascetic. "I’ll be damned."

"We all are."

"Funny."

"Crawford tried once to reduce my share of our earnings, saying that it wasn’t like I did anything with it. I told him that putting it in an offshore bank account counts as ‘anything.’ I may be insane, but I want what I earned. What I do with it is up to me."

"Then I’ll let you pay."

"Thank you."

A dark red rush of pleasure hit me, followed by a deep snap that made me wince and lick my lips at once. "Oh, yeah. Psycho boyfriend just killed Dumber. His friend, Dumb, will have to live with the guilt for the rest of his life that he helped get his friend killed over a woman he hadn’t even wanted." I snapped out of my daze when Farfarello pounded his fist on the top of my car. "Hey! Leave the car the fuck out of this!"

"Just getting your attention."

"I can always go back to Tokyo."

"Back to your god? Did you ever think that your attraction to Crawford, an authority figure, stems from issues with your parents and how they threw you out into the street?"

He did not just say that. "Say what?"

Farfarello cackled. "Don’t panic. Nagi bitches to me sometimes about how ridiculous he thinks the two of you can be. He also says that you flirt with Crawford like you’re a 12-year-old boy. I’ve been waiting two months for the right time to use that one."

How perfectly humiliating. Thanks, Nagi. Should I hate him more for being right or for sharing it with Farfarello? Then I got an image of Brad with pigtails to be pulled that almost knocked me on my ass with hilarity. Add the requisite anime tiny skirt and... he was actually still hot, just in a funny, really perverted way. Dammit.

I sent Farfarello the picture as punishment for listening to Nagi talk trash about me. He almost coughed up a lung laughing.

I really was the only person who tried to engage Farfarello on any real level, since most people treated him like a kind of furniture that could kill. Funny how I hadn’t noticed until today how inevitable this hook-up was. Funny how he could almost be functional as long as you didn’t leave him alone with his usually endless obsessive cycle of Catholic hatred and violence, though nobody would ever accuse him of being sane.

"It doesn’t bother you that I want Brad’s ass?" I asked.

"If watching you flirt with people bothered me, I would have killed you a long time ago."

"You would have tried."

We smiled, all teeth, at one another in perfect understanding.

"The cops are coming," I said, feeling them. His rage and insanity spiraling out of control, psycho boyfriend put another person down inside the club. Maybe I could stay--

"Schuldig!" Farfarello barked.

Fuck. Psycho boyfriend wasn’t the only one spinning out of control. I usually hid this kind of thing and passed for normal better. It had to be that I felt comfortable with Farfarello--and wasn’t that disturbing.

I unlocked the car, sat inside, closed my eyes, and let my mind wander to find our next destination, telepathic search engine style. I skimmed thoughts across the city, narrowing down, until I could say, "I know a place."

"Could you dress me up?" Farfarello asked as I took my small suitcase out of the trunk. I always kept an emergency stash of clothes, cash, and necessities there in case I had to run. Hell, I had stuff squirreled away in locations across Europe and Asia.

I smirked at him. "Well, well, well."

"Telepathically. You’re the one who wants to attract less attention in Kyoto. At least you do when you’re in your right mind."

"And which one would that be?"

"I could walk in there in my leather and bandages and see whether money really can buy silence."

"You’re currently dressed in a blue suit to the eye." Its color matched his eyepatch. Moment by moment, the suited Farfarello looked either dangerous in a strange way or like a kid playing dress-up, which was all him, not my doing. "Work it, girlfriend."

We walked through what looked like a reception being held in the sumptuous rooms. Men in tuxedos and women in gowns and jewels wielding champagne glasses gave us curious looks. Farfarello’s expensive tailored suit forestalled some of the questions that would usually be asked about his scars and eyepatch. Money changes everything. They immediately dismissed me as his assistant/beast of burden/playtoy. And people wondered why I was a misanthrope. You try listening to the unedited thoughts of everyone around you.

The very exclusive plastic Farfarello handed to the desk clerk had part of his real name on it. If I hadn’t been a telepath, I never would have guessed that he would even know how to use a credit card. Hell, I hadn’t known about his stash of cash, mostly because he rarely thought about it. Out of mind, out of my sight.

That little bit of exclusive plastic smoothed everything for us. When you bodyguard for the rich, you learn secrets and the tools of the trade of being rich. Of course, I’d picked up a taste for luxury in the process that didn’t do me any favors.

"Enjoy your stay," the clerk said to Farfarello, while giving me a brief look that mirrored his thought that I’d be part of the evening’s entertainment. I repaid his rudeness by giving him a temporary run of something like Tourette’s Syndrome. He started cursing and spouting non sequiturs loudly as Farfarello and I walked into the elevator.

The suite was as beautiful as strangers’ thoughts told me it would be. It had a large, sumptuous bedroom with a huge bed, a cushy reception area, a palatial bathroom with a huge tub, a bar.... A guy gets used to this kind of treatment. The clerk had given us a suite done up with traditional European furniture and styling, which meant that the bedroom, reception area, and bar had antique dark wood and fancy lines that were hell to dust.

I set my suitcase down near the bed, put my gun and my loaner knife from Farfarello down on the night table, then stretched, as if I could fill the room that way. It never worked but I never stopped trying. Sometimes my body felt too small to contain me.

I hung up my coat, sighing as I noticed the stains. The establishment had a dry cleaner that cleaned leather too, but somebody might ask about the blood. I usually didn’t get in close enough to my kills to have to worry about splashback. My gun holster shared a hanger with it, though it didn’t have to, because I could have put Schwarz and Weiß’s entire combined wardrobes in here with space to spare.

Not so many years ago, I’d lived in a room smaller than this closet and had to mindfuck my landlord to keep it. That man had thought he’d had my underage body in every perverted way possible, but I’d actually been sitting at the other end of the room counting down the moments until he came each time.

The tub was large enough to have a party in and long enough that I’d be able to stretch out. Whoever had designed the bathroom at the building we used as a headquarters for our little team must have been a very short man and a sadist to boot. By contrast, this would be so good....

Farfarello pressed up behind me, putting one arm around my waist and the other around my neck. "Come to bed," he said.

"Bath first."

"But you smell so good now...."

"I can understand the blood and sex, but the cigarette smoke?" I smoked sometimes, but right now I smelled like the victim of a cigarette hot box orgy.

"Nothing’s perfect." The arm around my waist strayed down so his hand could stroke me through my pants, while he rocked against my ass in a way that made my body purr that this was where that missing sex had been hiding. He let his lust roll over me in hot waves as he imagined me luxuriating naked in that plush bed. "The sheets look like they should feel soft," he said.

"If you keep stroking me like this, we’ll never make it to the bed."

He let me go, and when I turned to face him I saw that he’d already undressed a little, to the point where he stood there barefoot and only wore his bandages now on his chest and arms. I backed out into the bedroom, unbuttoning my shirt, and looked back to see that he’d already turned down the bedspread, the better for me to try out the sheets. I appreciated people who planned. He followed me, slowly gaining speed, until he tackled me down on the bed. Or tried to, because I wasn’t where I let him think I was, so he got a mouth full of blanket instead. I sat beside him and took off my boots.

I could almost see a black storm cloud of annoyance over his head, and I thought that it might be really stupid of me to tease a homicidal maniac, but he only said, "Naughty, Schu."

When I listened, I couldn’t hear him thinking that I’d pay for it later, so I answered, "I couldn’t help myself." I tossed my shirt aside.

Staring at my chest, he said, "So smooth...." He wanted to mark me so badly.

"I’m staying that way."

"Of course." He was torn between a pride in how fresh I was and an urge to brand me as his own, to be the first ever to do so.

I didn’t like either thought, so I said, "I’m not totally." I turned a little and pulled my hair aside so he could see my back, with its scars. Since I healed well, they were few and only noticeable if you looked for them. "I have a set of old scars from a bullet that went all the way through my left thigh too."

He moved closer to look at them and breathed hotly along my spine, making me squirm. "You were stabbed in the back several times."

"How metaphorically appropriate, I know." I didn’t have many scars, since my telepathy, speed, and preference for striking from a distance usually kept me out of harm’s way. I should have more scars than I do, since my mouth kept putting me in harm’s way.

Brad had been able to blindside me because I had stopped listening. I’d trusted him to be predictable. Funny, right?

Farfarello skimmed his teeth across the knob at the base of my neck, top of my spine. Annoyed, I moved away. "No," I said as I turned to face him.

He’d behaved himself so well during those blowjobs outside the church and inside the club, but sex in a bed seemed to mean something different to him. Maybe it felt more formal or official or some shit. Then I saw it, something I hadn’t noticed at first because Farfarello hadn’t articulated it to himself. For him, those blowjobs had been getting off, but the bed made this time sex. Claiming. Shit. If I’d thought our little go outside the church had been important, this would be even more so.

"If you don’t stop that shit, I’ll put a knife through your eye socket," I said.

His lust increased, and he smiled. "Schu, you know exactly what to say to turn me on."

Fucking masochists. I hate them. "Let me make myself more clear. I’m not flirting here. I won’t have sex with you if I have to spend the whole time worrying that you’re going to mark me up or take a chunk out of me. For me, wanting to fuck has nothing to do with wanting to be mutilated. I don’t get off on danger."

"I’ll be good." He moved forward and kissed my neck, working his way up to my mouth.

"I’ll be listening." This was going to be the most exhausting bout of fucking I would ever have, I could see that. He smiled against my mouth, pleased, wanting me to listen. "You’re a freak," I said. As if his pants with the straps attaching the legs one to the other, reminiscent of a straitjacket but with far longer straps, and his obsessions hadn’t already told me that.

"Do you think you’re the sane one?"

"Does there have to be a sane one?" I asked back, answering his question. Agreeing to this just proved that I needed serious help.

He gently pushed me down onto the bed and started to suck on my nipples, alternating. I writhed under him and fought with myself on whether telling him he could bite them would start a dangerous precedent. Caution won, for once. The sheets did feel nice against my sensitized skin.

I started the feedback loop and let him feel everything. He showed me how pretty my bright hair looked spilled against expensive white linen. The bitter, harsh cigarette smoke smell bothered him, but under it he could smell what we had done at the church, and that made him very happy. Killing with someone made him happy, since the lone hunter routine had been something forced on him by circumstance. As he humped me, he gave me an image of me from our time in the church, and in it I was bloody and limned in hot, vibrant colors, my face gleefully cruel as I sliced into a victim with one of Farfarello’s knives and spoke correct if badly accented Latin. Love you....

No. I tried to sit up, but he put one hand on my chest to keep me down and his other hand into my opened pants to fist my cock. Overwhelmed by his emotions and lunatic strength, caught on my own reactions, I still managed to pant, "That isn’t me. This isn’t me either, not completely."

"That and this are who you are when you’re with me. You can be anybody you want to be when you’re away from me. There is no real ‘you,’ Schuldig, you told me so. I listen."

I never-- I didn’t-- "Stop. Shut up."

He moved up to stroke my hair. "You know it. I didn’t mean to upset you with--"

"Shut up!" Something smashed my head from the inside out, and I blacked out.

I came to curled on my side, with the taste of blood in my mouth. When I swiped at my face under my nose, my hand came away bloody, so I swiped and swiped until my hands came away clean. My head felt like it was full of broken glass. Pain swung like an anvil through it when I tried to move it, and I couldn’t hear or feel anyone else through the pain. Shit. What did I do?

"Nnnnh," somebody said from the floor. "I never realized that... pain... could feel like that," Farfarello whispered, his voice sounding more damaged than usual.

It all started to come back to me. In my upset, my blinding need to make him stop talking, I’d lost all control and hit him with it. It shut him up. Of course, I’d also put myself down pretty badly. That’s why I didn’t do this if given a choice.

What a fucking day. I’d gone totally out of control several times today and in every way possible. This was why I kept my distance and didn’t let anything become too personal. I did one-night pickups, and they never knew that I read the best next move out of their heads. Getting off. Not sex.

Farfarello stood, then sat on the bed. The other three times I’d done this, my victims hadn’t been able to get up. One of them never got up ever again. But Farfarello didn’t feel pain like normal people did. I’d watched him keep going on with things torn, dislocated, and broken, damaging himself worse, aware of injury only when the injury impeded his movement.

"There is a me. I’m the one who hurts people," I said softly. Sane one? Why did there have to be a sane one?

He wasn’t angry. I’d known he wouldn’t be. I could lie here, too hurt and weak to move, and he wouldn’t take any vengeance. Hell, he was too amazed by what I’d done and made him feel to be pissed off. Besides, he was still horny. I’d laugh if it wouldn’t make my head hurt worse. At least everything was returning to normal for me.

"There is a you," he said, though he didn’t entirely believe it and figured that I was deluding myself, but there being a core me fit regular human experience enough that he couldn’t completely discount it.

"Damned straight. And I heard that."

"What does this feel like?"

"You want my headache? Of course you do." Why the hell not?

As I let him feel it, I could feel it lessen a bit. When he put his hand on my shoulder and rubbed little circles with it, I could feel his quiet happiness that I seemed to be a bit better now. He liked the pain too, since he’d never experienced this raw, weighted kind before. Brad would be shocked to see the nearly tender look on Farfarello’s face. So there, God.

"I don’t like to see you in pain," he said, sounding as if the thought shocked the hell out of him. It did.

"Glad to hear it."

He loves me... or what he thinks I am. The me I am when I’m with him. This situation kept getting worse. Messier.

I was still hard. Idiot dick.

"Let me help you feel better." Farfarello had heard about how sex released endorphins, and endorphins worked as painkillers.

I laughed, and my head made me suffer for it. "Fucker, don’t make me laugh when I’m like this," I muttered. "I know, you’re an optimist. I’d like to see if you could make it work." Right now, it felt like nothing short of replacing my head with a new one would work.

I looked through his one eye, watching his smaller, narrower world, to see what he would do. He carefully set a pillow under my head, then pulled my pants and thong off, letting out a hiss as he saw the puckered bullet scar I’d mentioned, at least the rear part of it. Yeah, not so smooth after all, though I probably had more scars inside my brain. He picked up my suitcase and quickly dug through it, going right to the condoms and lube. It sent a chill through me as I wondered how much I’d been sending him.

My body appeared to be crumpled in on itself, with its muscles tensed with pain. Farfarello surveyed it like an artist looking for the image he wanted in a block of stone. Reading him, I had some advance warning of what he intended to do, but it still shocked the hell out of me when he spread my legs and dove in to rim me. Nobody should have that kind of strength in his tongue. Nobody. All that knife licking he did had to be behind it.

I dissolved under the strong strokes and the pleasure of it, telling the pain in my head to take a hike, and watched my body relax through his vision. He kept going and going and going. Obsessive focus had a lot to recommend it. The inability to feel the aches of fatigue probably helped. Rimming progressed to tongue fucking and ball handling. Oh, fuck. Squirming, wanting more, lost in his enjoyment of my enjoyment, I slid down more and opened my legs further to give him easier access. It only helped that several other couples in the hotel were fucking and I could feel them. So could Farfarello through me.

I looked like a total slut, sweating, panting, begging for it. Amazed, eager, he thought of paintings of saints in the throes of martyrdom, the ecstasy of agony. Beautiful....

You like this, Schu. I can feel it. I never understood it before....

His tongue felt incredible, but I wanted something more, something bigger, and he gave me two slicked fingers, moving them by gauging my thoughts, finding my sweet spot and working it with ruthless precision. I panted out a laugh as his fingers faltered while he tried to deal with the spikes of pleasure I drowned him with, but then I went back to making embarrassing noises and clenching my hands on the mattress.

"Fuck me," I said.

This deeply meshed with me, he felt it like a compulsion. He shucked his pants so quickly that I barely felt them go. Meshed this deeply with me, he put the condom on without a thought. I know where I’ve been. He applied more slick to his cock that he probably didn’t need after the tonguing he’d given me--I don’t want to hurt you, Schu--then thrust in with a smooth motion. It was a lot like stabbing someone, he thought, so he’d had practice. He felt the same kind of release....

I pushed that out of the way for the sake of what sanity I still had and focused instead on how good, so good, everything felt, the hard thrusts that filled me, the rub of his body along my back. But he kept toying with me, taking advantage of how limp and boneless the pleasure left me to move me around and keep shifting positions and trying different angles, trying to figure out what worked better. Just fuck us already!

Next time, he wanted to watch his cock slide in and out of my body, figuring that it had to be a sight to see if it felt this incredible. It still seemed impossible to him. Watching and feeling me shake and beg, he thought that maybe in the future he should investigate the torture possibilities inherent in the application of pleasure instead of pain, particularly sexual pleasure. The Church had so many twisted ideas about sex that it might be really worthwhile.

I started laughing. He folded me and thrust in deeper on a new angle, making me yell out in joy and frustration. I had to come now. "How does it feel to fuck yourself? Do you like it?" I gasped.

He exploded into me as he really thought about what I was making him feel. The mind really was the most sensitive sex organ. His orgasm hit me in hot, bright white and coursed through my limbs, leaving me buzzing and high. I came. I had no choice.

I slept. Then I woke up in the wet spot. Alas, that ecstasy made you more likely to ignore things that feel really awful once the high faded. No way I could stay here. Aside from that, I felt really good.

Farfarello’s arm tightened around me. "Where are you going?"

"It’s bath time. C’mon, I’ll scrub your back. You have to let go of me first."

He let go but with extreme reluctance. I had to work on that.

As I ran the water, I tracked down the freebies class establishments left for its guests and took inventory. Those two fluffy terry robes would be used if I had to forcibly dress Farfarello in one myself. I also found a sewing kit, a few kinds of coffee, several soaps, shampoo, and conditioner, but he wrinkled his nose at the smell of the soap, shampoo, and conditioner. Too much like chemicals, cologne, for him. I pulled my own out of my suitcase, hotel stuff I’d lifted in London, and he approved of the spicy, woody scent.

I realized that he’d been seeping earlier into one of the bandages on his right arm. "Soak that off," I told him.

"I can just take it off."

"Along with a few layers of skin, making a huge mess. No."

He sent me a loud thought of what he’d done to his real and fake mothers in case I had any ambition for taking up the duty but still soaked the area until the scab holding his skin and the bandage together loosened. He still pulled it off too soon, making a freshly bloody mess. Fortunate that he didn’t bleed all that much.

Once he had all the bandages off, I saw a wide variety of wounds and scars. One looked infected, and I had the stuff in my suitcase to deal with that too. All of us had wound care experience. He probably hadn’t realized that the wound had gone bad. Sometimes I thought that he’d been put here as a reminder to everyone around him that pain had a purpose.

Then he took off his eyepatch and faced me, looking almost defiant. I knew what it looked like under there, since I’d been in his head, but seeing it myself still turned my stomach. How pretty he was under all the ruin only made it worse. Such a fucking waste. But I shrugged and said, "Get in the tub."

It annoyed him that I hadn’t cringed at the sight, but he said nothing. I climbed into the tub after him and lowered myself into the hot water. Now this was luxury. I didn’t have to fold myself at all, so I stretched out full length and reached for the shampoo.

Farfarello looked around like he didn’t know what to do with himself. While he did wash now and then, the expanse of water around him here intimidated him. It was like bathing in a small pool.

"Afraid of the water?" I asked.

"No." He started to soap up and watched in some fascination as I rinsed shampoo out of my hair with the spray nozzle nearby. This suite really did have everything.

Once I finished my hair, I did his, briskly massaging shampoo and later conditioner in, even as I wondered if anything could make his hair softer. He kept his eye squinched shut the whole time. If he got shampoo in his eye, would it sting? It’s not the kind of thing I dared to ask him, since he might decide to demonstrate for me. I even scrubbed his back, just like I said I would.

I would have soaked longer, but Farfarello became impatient with the whole sitting around in hot water thing. Hot water didn’t have any pleasurable effect on him. Poor bastard.

I made him sit still as I applied antibiotic salve to some of his fresher wounds and the infected one, which I’d managed to drain. He watched me solemnly, with the gears in his brain grinding since he didn’t know what to make of this. But he wouldn’t let me wrap the wounds in the new bandages I gave him, preferring to do it himself. Whatever. I put on the terry cloth robe and rubbed my hair with a towel.

Farfarello picked up my brush. "I want to brush your hair."

"Do you know how? Look, I’m just not sure if I want someone who barely knows what pain feels like doing it."

"I’m sure you’ll tell me if it hurts."

He gave off such sadness and had such a whipped look on his face that I turned my back and sat down. Besides, I couldn’t deal with watching water from his hair run down into his eye socket. I expected the first stroke to pull like hell, but he was so careful and sure-handed that it just felt really nice. Soon enough he had me just about purring under all of his care and attention.

But he started to get frustrated. He wanted to be able to feel my hair. It was so bright and beckoning, so there, but when he touched it it felt no different than anything else. I reached back and grabbed his wrist just before he could fling the brush at the wall.

"You’re tired," I said, turning around, not trusting him at my back. "Everything seems worse when you’re tired. Go to bed." As the urge for violence passed, his mind slowed, turning murky and gray.

Sleep wouldn’t help him. Medication hadn’t helped him. I could only let him borrow sensations he couldn’t feel himself. I didn’t know what to do, and I hated that.

Without an argument, without a word, he went to bed and immediately fell asleep. I worried. I don’t worry. I never worry. But, you know, if anyone could break a man who didn’t feel pain, it would be me. I climbed in behind him--at least he’d chosen the end of the huge bed that didn’t have the wet spot--but couldn’t sleep, even though almost everyone else in the building slept and dreamt. When I petted his damp hair, he sighed.

Farfarello had already been broken when we met him, with sharp jagged pieces jutting everywhere, but he’d been broken in a useful way. Just point him at the enemy and stay out of his path. He had rages he worked off on the clergy, but for the most part he’d seemed content.

But if Farfarello ever went utterly bugfuck, we had Crawford’s permission to kill him. Hell, Crawford had all but ordered us to. Don’t waste time trying to reason with him. Don’t try for a debilitating wound, because we’d all seen him press on like a zombie until extreme blood loss or damage knocked him out. It was fine if he went nuts on our enemies, but if he ever lost the ability to discern us from the enemies, just kill him.

Farfarello had always followed my orders pretty well, so well that some of our employers had the impression that I led the team while Crawford was our agent or my subordinate, which amused the hell out of Crawford. In some places we were known as the Schuldig. It had led Farfarello to ask me, "What does that make us?"

"Guilty," I’d answered.

"So we’re appropriate too. That’s good."

We rarely stayed in one place for long. Our current stint in Japan had to be the longest.

I fucked with people’s heads in ways both great and small every day, but they were strangers. I tagged them and changed their lives but didn’t have to mop up afterward because I never saw them again. Or they died. Either way, they were no longer my problem. I toyed with Weiß, but they were already so fucked up that my contributions just added salt to the sea. During our long stay in Japan, I could watch my small misery grafts evolve in them the way a scientist watched the progress of an experiment. Pets reduce your blood pressure and extend your life. But I never messed with my team, no matter how much I thought Crawford and Nagi should loosen up a little or Farfarello should put his obsession aside once in a while since even God rested on the seventh day. You don’t shit where you eat.

At least I’d never messed with a team member before, but now I had, and everything seemed to be getting messier and messier. If we had to kill Farfarello just because I’d fucked with his head in a way he’d begged me to do....

I didn’t know. I didn’t know. But whatever else happened, I’d make Crawford pay.

Something woke me up. Someone calling me.... Crawford, Brad. We had a mission. Nagi had called him to let him know. He hadn’t left Kyoto.

I got out of bed and went to the reception area, since it felt wrong to talk mind to mind with Crawford while lying in bed with Farfarello. Wrong? Aw, fuck, I had no sense of wrong. Once I sat down on the couch and communed with the straight lines of Brad’s mind that was true again. Right and wrong, outmoded concepts, didn’t exist. Only success mattered. But other, inferior people could be manipulated with ideas of right and wrong.... He hated it when I told him that he would have made a good Nazi.

To his mind, the world was a warehouse where everything had a place but some of it was in the wrong places. To Farfarello’s mind, the world was a harsh wilderness of grassy mountains, gnarled woods, and narrow winding streets, studded with box-like institutions where he ceased to exist for stretches at a time and the churches he hated/loved.

Straight lines. Crawford always put me in a box or on a short leash, while I played my role of free-spirited, insubordinate lieutenant, chafing against the lines, rebelling in small ways, but obeying. You aren’t my real father....

Perspective. Sometimes you needed to step away to see the picture. Having a gossipy teenage telekinetic around seemed to help too.

I would have been happier staying ignorant.

"Crawford," I said mind to mind.

"You usually aren’t awake this early," he said back, voice and some impressions only.

"You woke me up."

He smiled. "I didn’t think I could do that."

"I know you, and you’re thinking so fucking loudly."

"We have a mission."

"At what time?"

"We should leave immediately. It’s a long drive."

"You didn’t expect to get me this early."

"Schuldig--" he snapped, then stopped. To my surprise, he opened his mind to me a little more.

Looking out through his eyes, I saw that Brad sat at the edge of a Zen rock garden. I had a visceral reaction to those that I couldn’t control, like my revulsion when I first found out how bonsai trees were made. Order imposed with a rake or a blade.

They’d wanted to do the same to me with drugs and a scalpel, to cut out and throw away the parts that scared them. We only want to make you normal....

Brad knew. "I’m sorry. I really didn’t expect to get you this early."

Even given a limited invitation, I didn’t walk too far into his mind, because his precognition made him far too alien, his skewed time sense made my head hurt, and I didn’t want to know what it felt like to be only occasionally omniscient. He knew I’d stick to the more comprehensible surface of him.

"How do I seem to you?" I asked.

"You’re a ghost dressed in a white terry cloth robe sitting near me."

I nodded. "I’m being kept in style."

Concern. "He didn’t mark you, did he?"

"Well, he carved his name into my ass. It took a long time since there were so many letters. No, he didn’t mark me."

"On the outside. Schu, I’m sorry. I saw that future, and I know how you hate it when you get dragged--"

"So you kindly knocked me out and put me in a straitjacket? Thanks. That was really thoughtful of you."

Most of the time he couldn’t foresee what Farfie would do, and his words here revealed that he’d seen my future and reactions to Farfarello instead. I’d wondered.

One time we sent Farfie alone against a group that had a precog. His only order was the vague "Damage them. Be as whimsical as you like." He’d killed and mangled a team of fifty in an amazing variety of ways but never had to touch the precog, who killed himself.

"I caused the very future I wanted to prevent." It deeply pissed him off, because Brad Crawford, oracle, didn’t make mistakes like that. He’d been so certain....

"That must sting."

"Beyond words. I was wrong, Schuldig."

It touched me to hear that and feel Brad’s regret, but I said, "I’ll alert the media."

"The media.... I saw your work in the paper this morning. Four dead at a club."

"Four? Damn, I was on fire." His mind relayed the newspaper detail of the dead as the guy I’d pushed, a bartender, a cop, and psycho boyfriend. But.... "What?"

"You didn’t know that four people died?" Brad felt so sad, so worried. Afraid for me. "Who was the client?"

He didn’t believe in freebies. It almost made me grin. "In a way, I was the client. What’s your point?"

"Did any of these people even do anything to you? I don’t think they did. Even Farfarello kills for some kind of reason. This was... mindless work. I know you like your games, but you never kill random strangers without some purpose in mind. What happened?"

It sounded wasteful when he put it like that. "I just gave two people a tiny push to buy a girl a drink. The killing was everyone else’s fault."

"You were out of control."

I’d thought the same thing myself, but I couldn’t tell that to him. "There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m in control, and my shields are fine."

"Do you remember the trip from Tokyo to Kyoto?"

"Yeah." I remembered being wrapped in a kind of red reverie and buzzed with something like the aching anticipation you feel when you’re working to come. But that was it, and that had been a long drive.

"I saw a vision of you in a hotel room with your nose bleeding." His concern wrapped around me like a thick blanket. "What happened?" He knew exactly what that meant, and he wanted to know the circumstances.

"Only out of one nostril. It wasn’t even a full bleed."

"You ruptured a blood vessel or two defending yourself. Who attacked you?"

"Brad, I’m fine." I didn’t feel fine anymore. I felt scared, and my head had started to hurt again. "Nobody attacked me. I--"

"Went out of control." Just like I had at the church and the club.

I had gone out of control. I could lie, but he wouldn’t believe me. He knew. I knew.

"I was afraid of this happening," he said. "Let me take you home. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I made an error and compounded it with other errors. Tell me where you are, and I’ll pick you and Farfarello up."

That worried me. "He didn’t have anything to do with anything."

"I’m not going to punish him." He really wouldn’t. "He can’t stop being himself, and it’s not his fault that he can’t provide the structure you need."

"Structure." One of the holiest things in Brad’s pantheon of worship, right up there with power and order.

Order and structure might be considered weird gods for a professed anarchist to worship, but he figured that the order and structure would come after the overthrow of the current systems and the anarchy that would follow. True anarchy never existed for long, because inevitably people would come forward to take advantage and control. People like us.

Caressing me with his care, he told me that I was important to him and his plans. He needed me, and he wanted me to be well and happy. I knew he was manipulating me, but my telepathy told me that he was doing it with the truth. And it felt so nice to see him work so hard for it and put his full attention on me.

"I hate you," I said, but it sounded playful instead of sincere. Fuck, I could be such a girl sometimes.

I felt him smile. "I know." He caressed me again, but this time with thoughts of the mission and murder and power and things the way they should be.

I smiled back. "Manipulative bastard. Haven’t you learned yet that you can’t always be sure what’s best for me?"

"I’ll work at it until I get it right."

"This recuperation doesn’t involve straitjackets, drugs, or shock treatment, right? I have to tell you that you lost a lot of points with me by putting me in a straitjacket, and you’ll have to earn ‘em back."

"I think pampering has more recuperative power."

"Mmm. I have to warn you that only major spoiling will do."

He knew that, and he showed me some of the luxuries he had in mind before asking, "Where are you, Schuldig?"

I enjoyed vacations, but I loved my work too. How many people could say that? Since we had a mission, and Brad had some making up to do, I gave him our location, then said, "Give us a few hours at least. It’s disgustingly early."

I felt hands on me. Shit. I snapped the link, hearing Brad shout my name as I went, and came to hitting Farfarello’s hands away. Not a threat then.

To my relief, he had his eyepatch back on again. Holding back the winces had been rough.

"Where were you?" he asked, and I laughed. It annoyed him, but at least his mind ticked along as usual without the murky depression that had scared the hell out of me. "Schu, when I woke up you were gone, and then I found you here and you were gone." He showed me how I’d looked, head hanging back along the top of the couch, body limply sprawled, vacant. Frightening. Disquieted by the memory, he pulled me in close and held me.

"We have a mission."

A dark, streaky yellow washed through his mind. Anger. Jealousy. Sweet! "How did he contact you?" he asked.

I rubbed my face against the terry cloth over his chest, smiling over how he smelled like my soap. "He never left Kyoto, so I could hear him when he started thinking loudly enough." I could hear Brad trying to reach me now, worried that something had attacked me. I told him that something had surprised me and everything was fine. Give us three hours.

"Did you tell him where we are?" he asked in a dangerous voice.

"He’s our boss," I answered in my dangerous voice.

"You’re such an innocent."

"I’m not sure whether to be offended or laugh my ass off."

He held me tighter, just a hair away from being tight enough to hurt. "He’ll separate and punish us."

"He’s a practical man. He’ll be pissed off a bit at first, keep us separated for a little while, but we’re teammates and we’re useful to him. We live down the fucking hall from one another. He wouldn’t even put you in a straitjacket half as often as he does if you didn’t let him. He doesn’t want me for himself."

"That doesn’t mean he has to let anyone else have you." Farfarello took a deep breath, certain that he would lose me from Crawford’s efforts or me becoming someone else. He wouldn’t believe anything I said otherwise because my mind could change or be changed. "Things will change."

"Things are always changing. That’s what they do."

"How long do we have until he arrives?"

"I told him three hours."

He picked me up and moved me around until I sat atop his half-hard cock. Since we both wore only the robes, that put my bare ass atop his bare skin. His lust flared at the pressure and the look on my face. I ground myself along his length. "This would be a good time to be telekinetic," I said. Then I saw.... "You really are an optimist."

He reached into a pocket and took out the tube and a condom. "I told you so."

Letting him see and feel through me, I untied my robe and tossed it aside. His gaped where his cock had come forward and I was sitting. I slid back a little to let it spring up. I usually had a whole bag of tricks I’d use here, but he wouldn’t really feel any of them. Sometimes the direct approach worked better anyway. I put the condom on his cock, then gave its head a little kiss. With my past, I found the taste of latex erotic. He started to hand me the lubricant as soon as I thought about it, only proving the advantages of meshing this way.

I let myself fall backward onto the couch, spread my legs, and circled my hole with my slicked fingers. Farfarello’s remaining eye nearly fell out of his head as he watched and felt it. As much as I wanted to pinch my nipples with my other hand, I had to worry about starting a precedent, so I didn’t. I slid two fingers in and writhed as I immediately hit the spot I needed, sending streamers of pleasure and color through my body and his. Practice and all. Even my feet arched, leaving me with only the tips of my toes touching the floor from the one leg that had to sprawl off the couch. I fucked myself with my fingers for a while, then scissored them to open myself up more.

Feeling Farfarello moving forward, I shouted, "Stay!" He obeyed.

I sat up, then moved toward him on my hands and knees, cat stalking him. Once I had my hands on his hips, I stopped and stared at him for a while, letting his anticipation feed his lust. We watched each other with our eyes glittering and teeth bared, looking at each other through each other’s eyes. Then I stood and positioned myself, putting one bent leg on the other side of him on the couch, and put my hands on his shoulders. He put his hands on my ribs, which made me giggle a little and jerk.

"Fucker," I muttered. He asked me how he was supposed to know that I was ticklish there. "Fine. Last night you said you wanted to watch. Now would be a good time."

I lowered myself slowly, finding his cockhead through his vision and my feeling. I groaned as I took him in and shared the burn and pressure and rightness and the shivery pleasure. Nothing else felt like this, and watching it through his awed gaze gave it an extra kinky kick. Finally I pushed myself all the way down, and he filled me. We breathed in time together.

"Now would be the time to fuck me," I gasped.

He fucked me slowly but so thoroughly and worshipped me with his hands. Sensitized, I felt like I was all nerves, with his every touch and thrust setting me on fire. I rode his cock and emotions.

I smacked his hands when he tried to tickle my ribs.

His thrusts sped up, sending jolts of sensation through me that I passed on to him. He thanked me, he loved me. "Do you think I could forget this?" I asked. "You marked me on the inside." The only person I ever had sex with who knew what I was and wanted it.

His hands clenched on my hips, and he looked up at me. The only one?

The only one. Ever.

As my lust started to take on a more desperate edge, I grappled with him a bit, our hands and mouths scrabbling on each other. Feeling what I needed, he fucked me harder and fisted my cock. Yeah, perfect. As I came, I spilled into his hands, clenched down hard around his cock, and pulled him into it with me.

Satisfied and limp, feeling decadent, I stayed draped on top of him and wondered if we’d irrevocably stained an expensive antique. Maybe not, since terry cloth and his bandages seemed to be very absorbent. I rolled to the side to take some of my weight off him--not that it bothered him--and chucked the tied-off condom into the trash. Killer aim had many uses.

Petting my hair because he knew I liked it, he asked, "Do you think Crawford will give us three hours?"

"And you called me an innocent?"

"I guessed as much."

"I could take a look."

"No. I want you here with me."

Contented, I dozed for a bit while half-listening to the tick, tick, tick of his mind, catching his mood and only a few of his thoughts. He felt happy, dark, conflicted, jealous, possessive. Being Farfarello, he blamed most of the unfair bits of his situation on a cruel god. The good things came entirely from me. I’d earned a prominent place on the Catherine wheel of his thoughts.

Eventually his hand slid down my ass, and one of his fingers slid up into me, taking advantage of the lingering slick, working me with a skill he shouldn’t have. Oh, right, all that time observing people for his torture sessions gave him some talent here.

"What’s this?" I gasped. Still sensitized from our last round, everything felt stronger and had more of an edge. It almost hurt.

"My finger."

"Funny." Given two fingers expertly fucking me, I was humping him. "I’m not always in a sharing mood."

As he went on to three fingers, he said, "I like to watch you." He’d hidden his intention to do this under that comforting tick, tick, tick and familiar imprecations against God. Hard, he watched me, enthralled. "If you want me to stop, just say so."

I did. I didn’t. Oh, fuck, he was using four now.... Shaking, I scrabbled against his chest with clenched fingers, almost clawing. What next, fisting? I kept that thought carefully to myself, because he might see it as an invitation, and I didn’t want to invite him to shove his fist up my ass.

"I don’t think you’ve ever been so quiet."

"The gasping and groaning don’t count?"

"No."

"I don’t want you to get the idea that if you touch me any time you want, I’ll give you the goodies. I have some dignity." Until he twisted his fingers in a way that made me yawp. Too much....

I liked it and hated it and needed to come right now.

I had the thought that maybe he was being so rough on me to force me to make him feel what I felt to make him take it easier, but that didn’t figure in his brain at all. My writhing in pleasure always looked like pain to him; he couldn’t distinguish without me providing the subtext. Hell, while looking through his eye I couldn’t either.

But now he looked at my face, and his expression changed. "You don’t like this," he said.

I answered with an inarticulate sound.

He carefully slid his fingers out, leaving me relieved and unsatisfied. "You have to tell me these things, Schuldig."

"Sometimes things aren’t simple." I jerked off over his chest and came with a rush that felt almost as much like comfort as the pleasure of orgasm. But emotional comfort, because the edges of everything felt too raw and sharp. I collapsed at his side.

"I’m sorry," Farfarello said, looking like he meant it. Feeling like it too.

How could I explain to him that under certain circumstances I would have enjoyed the hell out of what he’d done? I didn’t try. "It was just too soon after the last time and too fast. It’s not that bad." I just ached. I closed my eyes and-- "Brad’s en route."

Farfarello thought of how he reeked of sex and me, how sticky we were, how he’d hurt me without meaning to, how he had fresh scratches on his chest, and how he was still hard and saw it all through Brad’s eyes. He didn’t give a damn about what Brad thought of him, but he saw us being separated over it. A plan of action snapped into place in his mind. He got up, putting my robe over me like a blanket as he left me on the couch, and started to run a bath, his first instinct being to wash away the evidence, like a good assassin. A bath would be nice....

I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to him smiling down at the sight of me curled up, dozing, on the couch. "I can get up on my own," I said when I heard his intention to carry me.

We washed again, even our hair, since we’d sweated during our exercise on the couch. Farfarello still couldn’t believe that he’d taken two baths in only a few hours, since he liked the smell of old blood too much to immediately clean it away. The hot water woke me up and made me feel drowsier all at once. Being what I am, I was accustomed to feeling contradictory things at the same time. I appreciated the chance to inspect his infected wound and some of the new ones again.

I felt Crawford, dusty and cool, walk into the elevator. I couldn’t help wondering if he tasted the way he felt. Farfarello did.

Farfarello dressed in yesterday’s clothes, since nothing I had fit him well enough. The shirts might have, if not for the way the bandages he wore marred the lines of them. I wore something fresh.

"Shouldn’t you blowdry your hair?" he asked.

"Fuck no. Blowdrying damages it. If Brad has a problem with seeing it damp, he can walk out the door and come back when I told him to."

"So vain." He sounded and felt amused.

"God hates vanity."

"God has no taste."

When Crawford knocked at the door, I opened it and said, "You’re an hour early."

He invited himself in and looked around, his gaze lingering on the war-torn bed. "If we leave soon, we’ll reach Tokyo in time. If not, we’ll be later and the mission will be harder."

"We’re almost ready to go. We’ll follow you back," I said. At Brad’s annoyed look, I asked, "What, are you afraid that Farfie will try to blow me while I drive?" I felt a spark from Farfarello. You will not, I told him.

Such pretty thoughts you put in my head, Schu. He gave them to me, showing me the thrill of the speeding car, the pleasure I would share with him, the excitement that came with an illicit act, the threat of death. His death fantasy featured us flying through the windscreen in a spray of blood and a confetti of sharp, glittering glass, with twisted metal shrieking around us, beautiful. He thought it a good way to go.

We wouldn’t go through the windscreen together, I told him. I would, while your head would be smashed against the steering wheel. You’d probably bite my cock off in the process, and my cock is something I want to have attached to my corpse, thanks.

Spoilsport, Farfie answered. It’s not like you’d need it anymore. Better to let me keep it.

"That’s rude," Brad said, annoyed at being left out and ignored.

"So’s arriving an hour early," I answered. "I didn’t even get a chance to use room service."

"You will."

Farfarello growled in my head. I told him that Brad thought I needed some rest and relaxation, and who was I to argue when he offered me goodies? Farfarello reminded me that padded rooms often had room service too.

The pissing match had begun, with Brad obviously on the defensive from my day out with Farfie and taking shots to try to even the score. Normally I enjoyed this kind of thing, but normally I watched and felt strangers doing it. Having teammates each take an end of me and pull wouldn’t be good for anyone and annoyed the hell out of me. Nagi would be pissed when we got back. Maybe those times playing at being the team’s leader had marked me.

I slipped my holster on and holstered my gun. I tucked the knife from Farfie into a piece on one of the straps, feeling weirdly self-conscious at the realization that Brad was watching me in a way he’d never watched me before. I don’t get self-conscious, thanks. My coat stank of smoke, but I put it back on, wondering when my sense of smell had become so acute.

"Can we get going already?" I asked, eager to split these two up.

Long, boring drive. I hadn’t missed anything the first time. Having to sit on my hip a bit to protect my aching ass didn’t make it any better. I couldn’t blame Farfie, not when he poked people with things as a living and a hobby. Brad’s thoughts in the car ahead didn’t give me any entertainment aside from the few times he let himself think about how annoyed he was that we’d jumped the track on him.

Next to me, Farfarello had gone silent and motionless, null inside, becoming furniture, something he tended to do when he had nothing to occupy him and couldn’t move much. He scared the hell out of airline stewardesses. He came out of it a bit a few hours in and started to spin one of his smaller knives, but as his brain took on that gray murk of light depression he turned the knife blade against the skin of his arm--

"What do you think of the idea of the happy fall?" I asked.

Since he didn’t turn his head, I could only see the side of his face that had the eyepatch and didn’t show much expression. He asked, "Happy fall?"

"In John Milton’s Paradise Lost. You’ve read it, right?" I knew he had.

He switched to English to say, "Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat...." Noticing my surprise, he returned to the local tongue to say, "Translating it would change the rhythm."

If you dropped me into a foreign area alone, I’d be speaking the native dialect fluently in 30 minutes. In two hours, I’d be thinking exclusively in it. Schwarz’s international nature stopped me from going too native, since it would be very bad if I started thinking I was Japanese. We used the local tongue for talking except when we wanted to discuss more secret things, which was when we switched to telepathy or English, since it was ingrained in two of our four members. Not that Crawford’s American English and Farfarello’s Irish English could really be considered the same language.

Anyway, hearing him say something in English just because he could shocked me. We really had been in Japan too long. "You know five lines of it at least."

"Happy fall. You mean the idea that Adam and Eve were destined to fall to Original Sin but it’s actually a good thing since they could then choose to worship God and had a messiah coming to them? My thoughts on it are complicated."

"This should be good."

He smirked. "Of course it was destined. If you were God, would you rather have two ignorant worshippers who are barely better than beasts worship you because they don’t know better or have a horde of worshippers who revere you for deliberately giving them a shithole of an existence in which they have to fight mortality, sin, hardship, and death?"

"But you’re not bitter."

"Fuck, no. Still, knowledge is better. Adam and Eve were beasts, ignorant. They ate, breathed, and fucked, nothing else."

"It doesn’t sound so bad."

"Nothing else every day for the rest of their eternal lives. What did they have to talk about? That today’s eating and fucking were better than yesterday’s, praise God? Every day was beautiful, perfect, and no doubt the same."

"That doesn’t sound so good. And you’re assuming they got to fuck."

"If Adam’s prior companion was banished from the garden and made the mother of demons for wanting to be on top, I would think he fucked Eve."

"Not everybody includes Lilith as an official part of things."

"I like Lilith. She was persecuted for no good reason."

"Says the guy who named himself after a demon."

Farfarello shrugged. "Adam and Eve were so ignorant that they didn’t even know they had a paradise until they were tossed out of it for their ‘crime.’ Of course it was destined. God says that you can eat the fruit of every tree except this one which He put right here and waved under your noses. This tree. This tree right here. Had He mentioned this tree? Their descendants have been punished for millennia for a spurious crime, yet we are supposed to worship Him for it? We grabbed knowledge for ourselves, even if we were tricked into it. I prefer this world of toil to a paradise I’d be too ignorant and innocent to enjoy, worshipping a puppetmaster god because nobody told me that I didn’t have to."

"You’ve given this some thought."

"Being in a straitjacket gives you time to think."

Amen, brother. "Let me guess, you thought that some of Paradise Lost was funny, but a lot of it bored you."

"It was less uneven than The Holy Grail. Satan gets the best lines."

"Of course he does."

"I appreciated the digs at the Roman Catholic Church." He leaned his head against my shoulder and nuzzled my coat.

"Do you need some private time with my coat?"

"I appreciate your coat."

Accustomed to his conversation shifts, I just answered, "I liked the green."

"No, this is much better. Your old mission outfit looked weird and sloppy, and it seemed to be put together at random in a dark room."

"Says the guy who accessorizes with scars and bandages. You’re not exactly a fashion maven."

"Green coat with those weird white pants and shoes, plus a bandanna and a pair of sunglasses perched on your forehead that you never wore over your eyes? I’m insane, but even I know better."

"I liked it," I answered, sulky.

"I’ve offended you." He rubbed his head against my coat.

"You just said I had no taste."

"Once perhaps, but you’re much better now. You look more threatening with the black."

"I’m not about looking threatening. I’m supposed to gain people’s trust."

"I think the dark green shirt you’re wearing now-- silk, yeah? It shines --would help with that."

"How the hell would it do that?"

"It makes me trust you." It also made him make playful little growling noises under his breath. Great, now my clothes were turning him on.

"You’re not exactly representative of the general population," I said. He licked the side of my neck, making me jerk. "You really wanna die in a car crash?"

"You said I couldn’t blow you."

"I don’t want to die."

"Neither do I." Feeling warmly golden, he curled up on his seat and leaned against me harder, like a big pet. "You’re glowing, Schuldig. It feels nice."

Even catching his surface thoughts, I had no idea what he was saying. Instead I answered, "Do you think Crawford would stop his car and get out if he foresaw us getting into a car crash because you’re feeling frisky?"

"You could look."

"Now you don’t mind me looking?"

"I am magnanimous for now."

I shook my head and lightly skimmed Brad’s mind. Shit.

"What?" Farfarello asked.

"Nothing."

"You reacted. Is he thinking naughty things?"

"He’s wishing that he could get a vision of a future in which tying me up and spanking me would make me follow orders better." He’d been boring only a few minutes ago!

Farfarello cackled. "Oh, no, Farfarello," he sing-songed, "Crawford is not interested in me that way. Not at all."

"He didn’t used to be."

With a sage nod, he answered, "It took my intervention to let him see you as a sexual being."

Not sexual, my ass. "The only way I could have been more obvious in that would have been if I’d flung myself onto his lap or did a full striptease in front of him." Hell, I’d propositioned him several times just the first day we met. We’d even simulated sex. What more did he need?

"I’m not impugning your slut credentials."

"Good. I work hard at that."

"It’s simply that he didn’t notice until you rubbed his nose in it with me."

"He doesn’t see everybody else as people." So of course it wouldn’t matter if I fucked non-people, especially if I only spent a few hours or a night with each one. They couldn’t threaten my allegiance to him.

"Things will be different for us when we get back."

"Yeah, but they might be better." They’d certainly be more interesting.

"You’re such an innocent."

"There’s no reason to be insulting."

Looking still and quiet as ever, Nagi opened the compound’s gates for our cars. His looks deceived in all ways. Just as his delicate, pretty body held enormous power, his quiet stillness masked an internal, loud battle to retain rigid control of his emotions and impulses for fear of his telekinesis getting away from him. I’d seen him emotional, and it’s something I would never forget, since he tore a mansion apart and brought a girl back from the dead and nearly killed himself doing it.

He hated and liked it that I knew his struggle, and he envied me my wildness. We’d both been tossed out into the streets and hated and feared for our abilities, but he felt that I was free, while he was not.

If I didn’t have that personal rule against mindpushing my teammates, I would have taken him out drinking with me sometime, just to see what would happen. I’d asked him nicely, but he was too scared, though he cloaked it under disdain. Somebody had to teach the kid some relaxation before he imploded.

As we walked inside, he said to me, "I’ve decided that I don’t want details."

"Who says I was going to give them to you?" Though I might after all since he’d said he didn’t want them. "Meanwhile, I’d like to know why you told Farfarello something about me behaving like a 12-year-old boy."

He almost blushed but stubbornly answered, "It’s true."

"Maybe. Since you’re only a few years older than 12, maybe you know."

"You’re trying to insult me with my age? You must be desperate. It’s not like you’re so ancient, either." It disturbed him that he felt like the only sensible member of Schwarz right now. Interesting that he thought that Brad had lost his head too.

"Sensible? It’s not like you’ve never done something risky that went against all of Crawford’s orders." Like loving that girl, Tot, and resurrecting her after Farfie killed her on Brad’s orders. Farfarello had been weird around Nagi for weeks after that one.

It still amused me that Nagi had brought a girl named Death back from the dead.

"That was different."

"Yeah. What you did was suicidal."

I’d annoyed him. "What would you know about love?"

"It’s like a drug." It impairs your judgment. "I could teach you a few things about lust. You only kissed your girl. I could give you a taste of what I ran off to Kyoto for."

Farfarello chuckled behind me.

Nagi kept the still, quiet mask but inside he quaked. He wanted it. He didn’t want it. It scared the hell out of him. Part of him knew that he’d fixated on the child-like Tot because his interest in her and hers in him wouldn’t be sexual and would never risk the loss of control sex would bring. The kid so needed to get laid.

"Leave the boy alone, Schuldig," Brad said from ahead of us, but he felt pleased to have everybody back and behaving like themselves.

He usually kept himself shielded better than that. Had he meant me to read that, or was he just overwhelmed, as much as he could be, by emotion and made a little careless with it?

As Brad briefed us on the mission, I felt the power and comfort of the routine, and I fought it, half convinced that Brad and Nagi were influencing me. Still, nothing could ruin the buzz of a job. We had enough time for a bit of prep, so I switched coats and stocked up on ammunition.

When Farfarello saw me, he said, "You can be so cruel," but he sounded admiring.

I’d switched to the green coat. "The other one needs to be cleaned."

Nagi sighed, long suffering. Brad ignored us. Except for the spark in Farfarello’s eye when he looked at me, it could be any day in the life for Schwarz.

Gun in hand, I ran, hunting our prey with my mind. I already had a bead on his position, and all I had to do was get there. Finally. There, in range.

I had one of those beautiful moments when my mind, eye, and hand synced into perfect communion. I fired, easily picking Ogiwara out of a crowd of bodyguards, hitting him right between the eyes. He knew only a brief moment of tasty pain before his thoughts snapped out of existence. As the bodyguards started to realize that they’d been completely ineffective, I picked them off too and messed with their minds and aims to keep myself safe. I loved this shit: the thunder of gunfire, the way their bloodlust fed mine, the sweet nibbles of pain, the clarity as fewer and fewer thoughts pushed at me, and the snap as they died and winked out, more satisfying than popping bubble wrap.

I also had a lover named Death....

Quiet fell with the last bodyguard. I breathed in acrid gun smoke and rode the last rush. Hearing a noise behind me, I turned to face it, gun ready, even as my mind identified Farfarello, who shouldn’t have been able to get that close without me noticing. Then again, I’d been high.

"How you shine," he said softly before grabbing me and kissing me.

Flush with afterkill horniness, I pushed him against a wall and thrust my body and tongue forward. His hair felt softer against my hand this time. My other hand still held my gun.

Nagi ran up and pushed us apart telekinetically. Brad, having seen my kill and its aftermath, had sent him. Damn. "Can we go?" the kid asked, annoyed.

Mind to mind, I told Farfarello that we could take this up later.

He saluted me. Inside, he thought that he would be impatiently awaiting the day when he could kill Crawford.

Once we reached the compound, Brad pulled me aside to speak to me privately, which didn’t surprise me at all. As we walked, he mentally flipped between wanting to yell at me for making out at the scene or praise me for the beautiful way I dispatched our target. What would be best, what would be best? No visions came to help. It all gave me a headache.

"Yell at me already," I said.

That decided him. "Why would I want to do that? That was a good hit." All innocence. He smiled a bit, knowing full well that I’d read his urge to yell at me.

We just knew each other so well that we got too comfortable and thought we knew everything. Knowing stupid shit like the fact that he could never read novels because he knew the endings before he finished them or that I went nuts when bits of other people’s lyrics attached to my brain and I couldn’t name the song, as so frequently happened, didn’t really mean we knew every way the other would jump. This whole thing with Farfarello, from Brad maneuvering us into a situation to me taking that situation and running off with it, had only underscored that.

"When you put it that way, I guess you wouldn’t," I answered, my manner dutiful in a very pretend way. Yeah, Brad, you’re never wrong.

"It was beautiful in its speed and efficiency. Surgical." His voice sounded warm enough to soak in.

"You’re turning me on, Brad."

"Am I?"

We’d always flirted with each other, but I’d always been the blatant one. The turnabout and the reasons for it made me uncomfortable. "And you thought I was out of control."

"Does that mean you don’t need the spoiling anymore?"

"I never said that. You owe me room service at least."

He smiled, and his gaze on me was so warm that I nearly melted under it. Even I only got to see this Brad Crawford very, very rarely. "I knew you’d be fine once I got you home," he said.

Years ago, Brad had met me alone first, and he remembered that meeting now. I saw my younger self through his memory. My hair, chopped short as punishment for some stupid thing or other, had stood up like a crest of feathers. It was one of the less painful but more embarrassing torments Esset used. The cut made me look a lot like "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This" era Annie Lennox but with slightly longer hair. I’d looked at him with challenge, amusement, and world-weary disdain. It had amused him that I smoked the whole time, since he knew that I bought myself favors from Esset’s other inmates with cigarettes, but he didn’t know that I’d smoked to give me something to do with my hands and put a barrier between myself and this new person who was supposed to control my life.

In that little room in front of the cameras and witnesses, I’d flirted with and taunted him, to the point where he’d asked me if I always acted like such a queen, but he’d intrigued me, showing some interesting thinking under the shit psi-shields Esset had trained into him. I heard him think that he needed me, and that had been a first. I sent him little flickers of telepathic messages that let him know the game I played and why.

Later, in the humid dimness of one of the stairwells the inmates used to make out in, one of the few places of near privacy in the compound, we really got to know each other as we faked a little bump and grind amidst all the real lovers. I told him that really going at it as we whispered our plans to one another would look better, but he refused to let it be real sex. He wouldn’t let me kiss him, not even a nuzzle or a lick.

Instead of whispering obscenities or sweet nothings into my ear, he told me that Esset had put us together as a team hoping to fail us all and have an excuse to recondition us into mindless drones. They’d seen willfulness under Brad’s obedient exterior, so they gave him me, who had a reputation as an uncontrollable troublemaker, and Farfarello, whose frequent unpredictability to even precogs was the trait that had made him a contender for an Esset team to begin with but also made him a risk to his own side. At that very moment, Farfarello had been locked in a padded room in a straitjacket under heavy sedation after an incident involving a spoon and a guard’s eye, so he’d hardly looked like an asset to the team. Nagi they gave Brad just because it would look suspicious if they put together a completely crazy team for Brad to try to lead.

I let Brad know that I’d been shirking and playing dumb in front of my trainers/keepers, that I was more powerful and better trained than I let on. He told me that he had no plans to help Esset raise Cthulu or whatever the fuck elder god they hoped would command the world. We’d seen how the servants used and abused their tools, so why would we want to bring their master in?

He wanted us to be the best team Esset had, the most trusted team, the better to strike at the right time and claim the world ourselves, and told me that if he had me on his side, the rest would fall into place. We two would be the core. He needed me; he’d seen it.

I’d never been needed or had a destiny before, while his ambition and hard-won clarity burned so brightly that I wanted to warm myself on them. He saw power and freedom for us, and who could resist that? Prior to meeting him, I’d been marking time, bored. I’d toyed with him a bit more, but my answer was yes, I was his.

We’d destroyed Esset, with a little bit of unwitting help from Weiß. We hadn’t quite conquered the world yet, but we were working on it.

Right now, Brad stood close to me, close enough to breathe my air. "You offered your ass to me three times in that first meeting. Even before the stairwell." He’d switched to English, the language we’d used then.

"German efficiency," I answered, also in English. "I offered my mouth to you too. Then again, I also used that mouth to call you Bradley, liebchen, zucker, honey, asshole, and moron."

"I thought you were the prettiest dyke I’d ever seen."

I snorted. "And you were the worst tease I ever met." I couldn’t stop smiling. "I haven’t seen you like this in ages."

"You missed it?"

"Lately that stick is lodged so far up your ass that I’m surprised you can’t feel it at the back of your throat." I’d unhappily watched him become colder and more controlled over the years.

"Cruel, Schuldig." He deliberately pronounced my name wrong.

"My name ends in ‘dick,’ asshole," I said, echoing my former self.

"You’re putting me on," he echo-answered.

"I just met you and already you want me to bend over?"

Instead of holding up his part of the doppelganger conversation, he looked at me with heat and lust. Oh, I felt it against my skin.... I’d wanted him from the moment he’d started to talk to me, behaving like what he was, the first person who’d treated me like I was an important asset to be won. I’d admired the way he’d leashed his power so it wouldn’t control him, even if I’d thought it made him a bit of a stiff.

"Yes," he finally said, all new, and kissed me. He didn’t taste dusty and cool, not at all. When we came up for air, he said, "I saw that. I kissed you because I knew you’d let me." He knew this day would come.

He saw the next move and the next move too, and so did I, through his mind. Then he did them, kissing, stroking.... He let me in a little, letting me see his pleasure, his fantasies, his affection, his next touch, though the rest remained too skewed and headache-inducing to delve into. We could do this forever, or for a few minutes that seemed like forever just from the echoes.... Oh, fuck, he’d figured out an entirely new way to mess with me. He saw me pushing him away a second before I did it, so he held on.

"Let me go, or I’ll make you," I said. How did I end up in a soap opera?

He let go. "There’s no problem here."

No problem? For years I’d wanted him, but he only returned my interest now because he worried that I would stray. So he used nostalgia and tricks against me. I’d say we had a problem.

But I still wanted him. We two would be the core....

He stroked my hair, and I hated myself for shivering. "We have time," he said, then walked away happy. Though only I would be able to see his expression and know it for happiness.

I felt Farfarello approach. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.

He noticed immediately, identifying my wet lips, mussed clothing, and musk-tinged scent for what they were. He shook his head.

It made me feel defensive. "You knew about this. You told me so."

"Knowing and experiencing are two different things."

"If you walk away, Brad wins. He played me."

Farfarello banged his head back against the wall, then asked, "Do you think this is the last time?"

I didn’t have to answer. He walked away knowing full well.

I banged my fist against the wall, then fled the compound, hating the world and hating what I was more than usual. Control. I wanted control of myself and my destiny. I’d thought I’d had it....

While body to body with Brad in the stairwell, I told him that I’d handle the psycho Irish kid. Getting into his room had been easy once the guards had been distracted by a sudden uncontrollable lust for each other. I had to work off what that cocktease Brad had done to me somehow. Making the surveillance guard fuck up the taping for that room had been easy. Using the coded lock hadn’t been hard either, not for a mind reader. Crouching in that padded room to watch someone in a straitjacket hadn’t been so easy, not with my memories and experiences. Could be me, I kept thinking.

Farfarello hadn’t had quite so many scars then, but his left eye had already been a casualty of his lifestyle. Doped up and straitjacketed into immobility, his hair chopped even shorter than mine, he looked like a mutilated porcelain doll, the victim of a particularly cruel child.

I combed through the thick, sticky fog dulling his stalled mind until I found a spark, then fanned it until his eye opened and he looked at me with something approaching sense. I got a taste of him then and reeled under the agony and the ecstasy he didn’t feel as others did, blood and stained glass, sweet and tart, faith and betrayal, angels and demons, the glorious flavor of blood on the blade, evil claws. Inferno. Dante’s Inferno.

Understanding where his nom de guerre came from, I said, "This is no place for a member of the Malebranche. Do you want to get out and do some real damage?"

He didn’t answer. He just stared into space.

"Right now," I said, "we serve in hell. We want to change that."

"We?" he asked as he leaned closer to me.

I didn’t back away, no matter how nervous he made me. "You’ve been put on a team. You, me, an oracle, and a telekinetic. If we fail, they’ll mindwipe us all. We’ll make them trust us, then we’ll take over."

"Reign in hell," he said, his brain clicking back into gear.

"Yeah."

As his eye focused more, it seemed less like he was staring into space and more like he was staring at me. "It’s been said that the Morningstar was the most beautiful of all the angels."

"Is that a yes or a no?" But I felt his answer as I felt his mind reaching for me. He tasted good....

"Yeah." He smiled almost sweetly. Almost. "I’ll be good for you."

Looking at it now, I saw it. Inevitability. What had started between me and Farfie yesterday had been the culmination of something begun the moment I first touched his mind in that padded cell.

You’d think that a telepath couldn’t be so blind, but I could only go by what the people around me knew and admitted. If they lied to themselves or didn’t know their own feelings, they left me in the dark.

So, now that I’d found a little enlightenment, what did I want?

This was probably a terrible idea. I already knew it was dangerous, since Farfarello could lose it totally. I just felt so angry at myself and Brad, which made me wild, which made me reckless. I wanted to give Farfarello something....

Farfarello had almost nothing in his room, just a table, a trunk, a few candles, and some knives. Some hooks had been bolted into the ceiling and walls for when he needed some quiet time of immobility. No bed or blankets, since he didn’t require them. The table might work for what I wanted, though I could imagine the bruises I’d end up with.

I hopped up onto the table and sat down, letting my legs swing. It felt smooth against the bare backs of my knees and thighs.

My cock went harder as I felt Farfarello walking down the hall, coming closer, and I could smell my own excitement and fear. I ran my fingers down the edges of the pleats and smirked at the tented section of my skirt.

Amazing the things you could find in Tokyo, even on short notice, if you knew the right people.

He sensed someone in here as he reached the door and opened it in a way that would give him cover as he attacked, his knife ready. Then he saw me. His gaze feverishly ran over me, over my long pigtails, white shirt with Peter Pan collar, green plaid, white knee-high socks, otherwise bare legs, and lace-up shoes. He was shocked and angry to see me in a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform and wanted to tear it off with his knife, but at the same time he’d gone completely hard at the thought of taking me like this, how blasphemous and wrong it would be.

I nearly drowned in him--hell, I nearly came from his image of fucking me from behind with my skirt lifted up--but I had to make sure he jumped the right way. "This is one of Brad’s fantasies, but I thought you might find it interesting too."

That decided him. If I wanted to give him something I wouldn’t let Brad have and pledge my allegiance to him in flesh and perversity, how could he refuse me? With lust and love burning through him, he definitely couldn’t refuse.

He gently pushed me backward, down onto the table, and lifted my skirt, smirking at my white cotton panties, already wet from my anticipation. Gulping in a harsh breath, he cut them away with two slices of his knife, too impatient to slip them off. Watching this through his eye, I almost died of worry and lust. Lost in dark desire, excited, his thoughts flew fast and confusing, too difficult to follow. I had no idea what he’d do.

But I knew that this would be fast and hard, and I wanted it that way. Fuck, I needed it that way. I thrust the tube of lubricant and condom into his hand.

When his fingers slid right into me, he said, "You want this so badly, don’t you?"

"Oh, yeah." I hissed as a talented twist of his fingers made me see stars, and I shared that with him. Felt so good.... I groaned and hooked my ankles around his waist as he fingerfucked me.

Brad. I felt him standing outside, listening, watching through the open space left when Farfarello had been too stunned to close the door all the way. He felt incredulous and betrayed and jealous and awash with lust, and that was without him even knowing that I had taken this scenario out of his brain. He had his hand clamped down on his hard cock, which was as treacherous as his subordinates were. As treacherous as his visions were. Why hadn’t he foreseen this?

And he hadn’t even seen my pigtails yet.

I hadn’t thought I could get any harder. "Just fuck me," I panted to Farfarello.

"On your feet. I want to take you from behind, against the table."

I stood on legs that wobbled and went around the table so I’d be facing the door. Brad’s heated reaction to my pigtails almost made me choke on laughter. Hey, I’d gotten them out of his head. After some initial confusion, Farfarello followed me, figuring that I simply showed the standard assassin’s dislike for having my back to the door. Once he positioned himself behind me, he noticed that it hadn’t been closed all the way. As he ran his hand down my ass and pushed down, bending me over the table, he thought at me loudly to ask if someone stood there.

Guess, I answered.

I felt him smile savagely. He almost ripped the zipper off while unfastening his pants. He still couldn’t believe I’d done this....

I spread my legs to give him a better look as he put the condom on. As he stroked them, he asked, "You shaved?"

I didn’t have much body hair, but it felt like the right thing to do. "You like it?" I asked. I jumped as he smacked my ass, since he’d given me no warning.

"You’re my bad girl, Schu?" He smacked my ass again.

Oh yeah, he remembered me mentioning that Brad had the urge to spank me. I squirmed at how hot the handmarks felt. "I’ve been very bad."

Farfarello wished he had more time to play, but he wanted me too badly. I yelled at his first thrust in, a good and bad yell, since his thrust pushed me into the edge of the table and rubbed my hard cock against the stiff fabric of my skirt. Burn and pleasure and stretch and pain and too much.... Farfie comfortingly stroked my back.

Outside, Brad fought the urge to come in and stop this, but his gripping hand on his crotch had turned to a stroking one. It burned him to get this scene he never thought he’d see, but to get it with someone else as the disciplining father figure....

Father figure? Sick puppy.

Then Farfarello thrust again, scattering any thoughts I had on Brad’s perverted incest kink. Farfarello started a hard, fast rhythm, and I pushed back to get more each time. Pleasure seemed to be branching out from my spine to swirl out into the rest of my body. I couldn’t even care about the bruises I knew the table was leaving on my abdomen, since all the rubbing along my front did good things to my nipples. We groaned together, while Brad seethed and wanted me and unsuccessfully fought the urge to jerk off. I saw us through his eyes: me spread out with the skirt pooled around my waist, hard bliss on my face, begging, wonderfully wrong in my uniform and pigtails, and Farfie fucking me with speed and force, his hands firm as they moved along my hips or over my hands on the table, an expression on his face that Brad couldn’t interpret.

I knew it. I’d seen it before.

"Fuck, is the fabric of your skirt really that rough?" Farfie asked.

My laugh sounded more like a gasp. "Catholic masochism."

"Yeah."

Farfarello’s urgency built. I was too beautiful and the situation too twisted for him retain control of his darker urges much longer. He’d hurt me soon, and he couldn’t allow that to happen, so he grabbed my cock and started to jerk me off in rhythm to his thrusts. Assaulted with sensation on two fronts, I came hard and felt him go off.

Watching and listening to us, Brad hit orgasm too. As he wiped his cock and hands on a handkerchief, he wondered if I’d heard him here. I didn’t let him know. Walking away, he decided that he’d just have to try harder with me.

Unbelievable. I never thought I could be wanted by too many people.

Farfarello pulled us both up to lie down on the table and cushioned me with his arms and body. He wanted to cut the uniform off me but worried that his shaking hands wouldn’t be careful enough. "I think I know what you meant with this, but I know it’s not done."

"Huh?"

"You’re still vulnerable to him. But...." The gears turned. "Perhaps it’s like the happy fall. That you could be tempted by him but still come to me in the end...."

"Is better than me just sticking to you without thinking about it?"

"I’ll tell myself that."

Well, that made me feel like shit. "I am what I am." I was trying to be better.

He nuzzled my ear. "As long as that’s mine."

  **********************THE END**********************

  "Now, why you wanna try
To classify the type of thing
That we do?
‘Cause we’re just fine
Doin’ what we like
Can we say the same for you?"
-- "Pop" by N’Sync