Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ The Rain Doesn't Grieve ❯ 09 ( Chapter 9 )

9

 

I never, never wanted this. I always wanted to believe, but from the start I'd been deceived.

 

Omi ~ Takatori

 

The apartment had been arranged with a wheelchair in mind, which was convenient if a little annoying. I wanted nothing more than to be rid of the thing; the reminders were already starting to bother me.

 

At least I didn't need help going through things. Files and discs and tapes had all been arranged within reach, here as well as in the office. It was hard enough dealing with them alone. I wasn't sure I could handle company.

 

The crimes of my family went deeper than I'd suspected. So much darkness, so much sin. Brother against brother for three generations, finally degrading to father against son. And woven through it all - the ubiquitous presence of Kritiker.

 

It looked like, in the beginning, Kritiker had existed to offset organized crime. Fair enough. But it, too, was a form of absolute power, and it corrupted its handlers one by one. The rift within the family grew, and apparently reached a splitting point with my father. Anger became rage, and the organization that had been a shield for the family's indiscretions became a watchdog against one man's existence.

 

Kritiker had become dirty. The knights were no better than hunters now.

 

Shuichi and Reiji. The oldest drama in Japan. Two brothers, locked in a dance of hatred, not caring that innocent lives were swept away in their madness.

 

I wish Ken were here. He'd find a way to make me smile in spite of this.

 

I ran my fingertips over the rough wood box for the hundredth time since Manx had given it to me. Curiosity and repulsion had kept that box shut for three days before curiosity had won, and once satisfied I had shut it away again, the curiosity and the box, until today. I've been thinking about a lot of things lately, and wishing the decisions weren't mine to make. But they are, and I will try to be wise. No matter how much it hurts.

 

I whispered a little prayer as I had done each time I'd opened this box before, and likely always would. There was some superstitious tremor in my hands, as though I were defiling a grave, as though the things inside this box held the souls of their owners. Still, no matter how silly it seemed in daylight, by night I would look inside, the prayers soft on my tongue.

 

Memory played fool with me, taunting me with half-seen truths and half-imagined possibilities. Still, I couldn't get past the cold chill that seemed to linger about the things in this box. Things that, perhaps, should have been buried with the dead. I thought about the golden necktie-chain, and how its owner was probably still alive. But this was different: I knew these men were dead.

 

That didn't do anything for my fear of the ghosts.

 

I picked up the narrow reading glasses, the lenses smudged with oil and soot. They had been in Reiji's pocket the night he had died. The night Aya had taken his revenge.

 

Taken revenge and removed his own reason for living.

 

The earpieces were greasy, revolting and yet so very humble. This man who had refused my ransom and set in motion his own destruction at the hands of Weiß - his eyes were weak. He had been nearsighted. Quite a fitting weakness, really - shortsightedness.

 

An ugly question hovered around my heart, a question I feared more than most. He'd had the money; why hadn't he paid the ransom?

 

No, that wasn't the question. What I really wanted to know was how did Uncle know where to find me, and why did he bother? Just to spite his brother? To turn me into a weapon in his own private war?

 

All that was irrelevant now. Both were dead, and I was left to sort through their personal effects as their sole heir.

 

I set the glasses back inside the box, folding them as neatly as I'd found them, then picked up the worn and battered diary. The paper smelled funny, as if it had been set down too close to a chemical fire. I'd tried to read it once before, but it was so disjointed it was nearly impossible to decipher.

 

This time I merely let the book fall open as it would. Again, Masafumi had been rambling about the fountain of youth and undying cells. I'd always thought that undying cells were a cancer, something that usurps the natural order of life and growth and turns it into a forced march toward an early death. But my mad brother had thought otherwise, to the point of really believing it was science's duty to free mankind from its own cellular prison.

 

If he hadn't been experimenting on unwilling subjects, and doing a hundred other unethical things besides, would he still have been targeted by Kritiker? Or was it because he was the son of Reiji?

 

If Reiji hadn't abandoned me, would I have been sacrificed to bring him pain?

 

Already I knew the answer would have been yes. I placed the diary back in the box, careful not to jostle the eyeglasses. I bypassed the little diamond-studded wristwatch, ignoring the pang in my heart as I did so. She had deserved so much more than she had gotten, but in a way it was almost a mercy that she had died never knowing her father's true nature.

 

My fingers touched on the items I'd been looking for, and I brought them into the light. Then, not really sure I'd planned to do this, I shut the box and set it aside. These coins would stay with me, for luck if nothing else. Though they had brought their first owner damn little of that.

 

Three coins, worn about the edges, the gold dusty looking from years of fingerprints, years of trust. Either Hirofumi had disregarded them or forgotten to ask; it was hard for me to believe that such a cared-for oracle could play him so false.

 

My breath hitched a little and I shook my head in pity. You were used badly, my brother. I shut my eyes and again saw his car hurtling toward me, his face a rictus of anguish and despair. He had been pushed to the edge and over, and there had been only one way for that to end, for either of us.

 

But now, with all the knowledge of Persia at my fingertips, I felt like a common murderer. Worse, like a cheap conspirator with no regard for the lives destroyed along the way.

 

With a bitter smile I reminded myself that I probably didn't have all the knowledge of Persia; that man would have taken some of it to the grave, for certain. Still, what I had learned was chilling.

 

Hirofumi had been destroyed many years before I had ever taken his life. He'd gotten caught between Kritiker and Reiji's ambition, and like so many before and since, he had been crushed by it.

 

He and I were much alike. I took a deep breath and regarded the I Ching coins again. I wondered what it must have been like for him, a young man under the thumb of someone like Reiji. And when he had managed to get away from him for a while, to attend university in Europe, he had become a pawn in the war between the brothers Takatori.

 

I'd never thought much about the other units within Kritiker. Not that we were told much, but we knew they were out there. Now I knew, and it left my mouth sour.

 

The Crashers were a crack team of infiltrators and information thieves. Their purpose was to blackmail and generally disable a target by threat of disclosure. Typically, they could shut down an illegal operation before it ever got out of hand, before it ever would require a killing team like Weiß.

 

They had been sent to shut down Takatori Reiji's political career. Kritiker had learned that one of Reiji's sons preferred men, and in that particular season such a thing was still a source of shame. Shuichi had set the Crashers on Hirofumi, gathered incriminating letters and then threatened his father with a scandal. It had worked - they had slowed Reiji's ambitions for a few years, at least.

 

It didn't matter that they had destroyed an innocent man's life.

 

Damn this.

 

It could have been me.

 

I dropped the coins on the table, intrigued by the patterns but not yet knowing how to read them.

 

Kritiker, instrument of hate.

 

Gold coins.

 

Gold chain.

 

I frowned, then scooped the coins up and wheeled into my bedroom. I opened the nightstand drawer and took out the small box with Schwarz' tie chain.

 

Gold.

 

Not white. Not black.

 

Durable. Gold endured.

 

If Schwarz and Weiß could both survive the sea, then I could certainly find a way to redeem my heritage.

 

I will make Kritiker clean again.

 

And…I will do it standing.

 

 

 

 

AUTHOR'S NOTES

9

I never, never wanted this. I always wanted to believe, but from the start I'd been deceived.

“The Great Disappointment” - AFI Sing the Sorrow

 

Omi ~ Takatori

Knowledge is power. It can also be grief. But whether grief or power, it is still knowledge, and Omi now has more of it than he'd expected (and yet less than he might).