Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Think Like a Gun ❯ Chapter 1

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: Inspired by the dyejob a woman who rides one of my evening trains has. Really.

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"Think Like a Gun"
By Viridian5
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He didn't want to watch, but he couldn't look away. In any case, he could hear it, the grunts and wet, fleshy sounds. Making his voice as hard and cold as possible, he said, "Turn this off, or I'll turn it off for you."

Knowing he meant it seriously, Birman turned off the TV. "So, Aya. What do you think?"

He wanted to throw up or run screaming. He wanted to find his sister and lie like a blanket over her comatose body so no one could do to her what was being done to the little girls on that video. "I doubt you exempted me from the Umezaki mission to have me watch this filth as entertainment." Their dazed, drugged eyes burned into his brain....

"There are less hardcore, documentary-styled porn videos in Miyamoto's oeuvre, but I wanted you to get the full effect."

The video she'd shown him had even shown the thugs picking the girls up off the street and dumping them in a van, no doubt to heighten anticipation and show the consumer just how much trouble the creator had gone to to find real, untouched schoolgirls for the production. He'd recognized one of the girls' uniforms as belonging to the school he and his sister had once gone to. "I have the effect. What do you want me to do?"

"Miyamoto Hikari is the father. He runs an empire he'd started small with gambling and murder for hire, and his money funds his son's... artistic pursuits, which are lucrative themselves."

"The son." Aya spat out the words. "Who is the son?"

"Miyamoto Seiji. A difficult birth, he'd killed his mother, and the father lavished care on the sickly child in honor of her memory. Many people say that the son is deficient, perhaps from oxygen deprivation while being born."

Aya nodded. "You want me to kill the son, then. Good."

She smiled slightly. "No. We want you to kill the father and implicate the son in the death. You're perfect."

"What does implicating him entail?"

"Ueda said Seiji could hook me up here," the dark, dead voice said over the callbox. Ihara didn't like the sound of it, but what he saw of the body it belonged to looked like it belonged at one of Seiji's parties, and Ueda was a name Ihara knew. He buzzed the kid in.

As the kid walked into the reception area, Ihara knew that Seiji would like him. Thus, he made Ihara really nervous. Kid looked like something out of an anime with his choppy red-striped black hair and the black eyeliner that branched away at the outer edges of his eyes and then down to follow the angle of his cheekbones. Only shiny silver metal buckles and heavy rings broke the black of his leather jacket and skintight outfit with its leather straps.

Fingers clad in black leather tapped imperiously on Ihara's control desk. Icy burgundy eyes stared into his. Seiji would love the disdain. "Ueda said Seiji could hook me up here."

"I heard you the first time. Nobody gets to see Seiji without a patdown first."

The boy smiled sharply, then dramatically spread out his arms, inviting it. Fuck, Ihara hated this.

Kid might be a junkie, but his body felt like he kept himself in good shape. Dangerously good shape, but Seiji liked it that way. Ihara found a big metal box in the kid's bag. When he pressed the button on it, two prongs came out and crackled with electricity.

"You'd be surprised by how good that can feel," he said, his smile deepening, his voice still dead. "I have more toys for the party in there."

Freaks. Ihara dropped it back into the shoulder bag. "You can go up. Floor 40. The elevator will be locked against stopping at any other floor, and there are video cameras in there. Don't get cute."

He pursed his mouth, which sparkled a little. "Do I look like the kind of person who gets cute?"

Ihara shuddered and wished him good riddance. If he didn't owe the family so much....

"I won't wear a wig," Aya told her. "It would get in my eyes at the worst moments."

Enko gave him a sour look. From all he'd seen, it was her favorite of her two expressions. He liked her for that, actually. "I could use temporary dye, but it will probably stain for a while afterward," she said.

"Fine with me." It should stain. All things did.

The black she put in made him look even more like a stranger, adding to the effect of the eccentric eye makeup, lipstick, and contacts. She'd brushed sparkling silver powder along his cheekbones too before applying the eyeliner. Buckling and fastening him into his outfit had taken a ludicrous amount of time. The whole point of this exercise was to have Miyamoto be killed by someone who did not look like Abyssinian.

"What are these marks on my face?"

"They're tribal."

"What tribe?"

"You have no knowledge of contemporary trends at all, do you?"

"No, and I don't care."

"Should I dye your eyebrows too? You'll go blind, but it would look good."

He really did like her, not that he would tell her, since she'd probably be offended. "You can pencil them black, since you've already established that I like to draw on myself."

Aya would have been happier knowing that Omi was taking care of the camera system, but this time he had to trust to Kritiker's operatives to keep him invisible to security at the right moments. He pulled one end of a cord out of his box, jacked in to the elevator control system, and set his destination as the 27th floor. Kritiker should be disguising that too. He opened another part of the box and assembled the small silencer.

As soon as the doors opened, he started to pick off his targets. Guards here. While he was good with a gun, he hated the disconnected feeling it gave him. He pointed and squeezed, and someone across the room died, as if by magic. It felt dreamlike. By contrast, using a katana let him feel what he was doing through impact and the splash of blood, cause and effect.

Thankful that he'd brought several clips, he mowed through what seemed like a small platoon of guards before reaching Miyamoto Hikari's room. Hikari tried to shoot him in the head as he came in. Ah, so the crimelord thought himself to be a professional, a crack shot. Aya shot him between the eyes. Now that was a professional's calling card. Not just anyone could make that shot.

Aya felt nothing. It had been like a movie. He really didn't like guns.

He knew he'd hate what came next.

"What does implicating him entail?" Aya asked.

"His father has his room bugged, video and audio," Birman said.

"Lovely people."

"Maybe he doesn't trust his son, or maybe he's a pervert. You're to go to the party, get to Seiji in his room, make it seem like you're intimate and he hired you to kill his father, then leave."

"Intimate? You want me to play a whore?" He had standards. He might have done it to help him get a chance to kill Takatori Reiji before or to find his sister now, but for no other reasons.

She smirked. "You just have to be yourself."

"What?"

"He's impotent, so you don't have to worry about your virtue."

"The tape I just saw showed me how the inability to get hard is no impediment."

She shook her head. "You only have to be verbally nasty to him. He loves that."

Aya unclenched his hands as he realized how much his fingers and palms hurt. "How long do I have to socialize with this bastard to make it stick?"

"You'll have to use your discretion. If you play it right, his own crime family will kill him in such a horrible way that it would be better than if you'd done it yourself."

No, it wouldn't.

How friendly all the junkies were, no matter how much he tried to dissuade them. They all wanted to offer him poisons to smoke, snort, or shoot up. Why did people do this to themselves? They were morons. Some of them, lost in their own little worlds, rubbed themselves against him, forcing him to swallow down his urge to break some bones. He put the wraparound black shades on and started to appreciate why Yoji wore sunglasses, since they provided a wall to hide behind. The various smokes in the air made his head spin a little.

Seiji had to be here somewhere, and Aya didn't want to search the entire floor for him, so he found someone well-dressed and relatively sober and said, "I need to find Seiji. He hired me."

She swept her eyes all over him. "He chose somebody tonight, but I think you're a better choice anyway. Follow me."

She led him down a hall filled with people and stopped in front of a set of doors. When she opened it with a "there he is," Aya looked in to see a haughty looking young woman in a low-cut gown refuse to give the man her pipe. Aya didn't have time for this shit, so he walked in, grabbed her arm, and dragged her across the room.

"I'm the one!" she yelled at him as he deposited her out in the hall.

"Maybe you will be again. For now, get lost, or I will make you wish you had." The dark shades might have diluted the power of his death glare, because it took him half a minute to intimidate her into backing down and slinking off.

Seiji looked awed. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, lean, and pleasant looking. Some people might think him attractive. He had a languid, soft air to him. "Where did you come from?"

Aya wondered where the bugs were hidden. "Around. You know that. Seiji, you are a pathetic creature, but I'm compelled to spend some time with you anyway."

"Oh, you're good." When Aya grabbed him by the neck and pushed him onto the oversized bed, he said, "Very good. Mmm, gloves."

"Sit. Stay." Aya backed away so Seiji wouldn't think he intended to join him on the bed.

"What's your name?"

"None of your business."

"You need a name, then." Seiji's eyes lit up. "I'll call you 'tiger.'"

"You can call me whatever you like, but I won't answer to it."

"Tiger, take off your sunglasses."

"No." He needed that wall.

Seiji smiled. "Oh, you really hate me, really despise me." He sounded so pleased. "That's why I want to see your eyes so badly."

"Surely you've come across that before."

"People 'hate' me because they're paid to or want something, but they're bored. It's just business. Or the hate is real but mixed with fear of my father, which dilutes it."

"You'll never have to worry about people being afraid of your father again."

"Either I'm too high or not high enough. Or maybe you're just crazy, tiger. But I'm enjoying this anyway. Who found you for me?"

"Ueda, remember?" Why not? Ueda's name had gotten him in, and if the Miyamoto crime family chose to take vengeance on a drug dealer, Aya couldn't feel sorry over it.

"I'll have to thank him."

"Don't worry. Someone will." How much of this did he have to do before he could go? The way Seiji looked at him, as if he were property to be devoured down to the bone, made his skin crawl.

"Do you know why I'm calling you 'tiger'?"

"I really don't care."

"It's amazing the weird perks being rich gets you. Dad got me a chance to pet a tiger. They had it tranqed for dental surgery or something, so they told me that I could do whatever I liked. I couldn't stop thinking that here was a wild animal that could have ripped me to shreds, and instead it was lying on a cold metal table with some bored rich kid feeling it up for kicks. I felt so fucking powerful.

"That's you, honey. You hate me, I can see it, and you could kill me, but you won't kill me for whatever reason." Amazing. People with far greater insight had seen Aya and never realized his vocation, while this damaged creature knew what he was. "If I got a shot of this daily, I wouldn't need to make the kiddie porn to get it up." Faster than Aya would have expected, Seiji moved forward and pressed hard down the black line along his right cheekbone with his thumb. "I would paint you in stripes...."

Instinctively, Aya punched him hard, so hard his head rocked from the blow and his body bounced as he hit the floor. At last, Aya felt that sense of connection, cause and effect, reverberating through his hand. He wanted more, but he couldn't have it, not here. Seiji smiled and laughed, pleased, even as he wiped the blood away from his mouth.

"That wasn't part of the deal," Aya said, trying to turn this back to implicating Seiji because he had to get the fuck out of here.

"The deal? Good thing for you I like 'em crazy." Seiji looked up at him with total impudence. "Okay, fine, tiger, the deal. If you feel like we have some kind of deal, I want to make a new deal. I want you, and I can make it worth your while. I'd love to fuck you, though I might have to cut you out of that outfit, but if you just stood there while I stared at you, that would be fine too. What's your price?"

Aya had no price. He was priceless, and would remain that way. "I removed your obstacle. I just showed up to tell you it was done."

Seiji stood. "I want to keep you, crazy or not. I collect broken things, you know. I broke my own mother but didn't get to keep her. You look so strong and straight, but I get the feel that if I found the right spot to poke, you'd shatter. So brittle.... You'd keep me interested for at least a week." He was blatantly aroused. Maybe he only had situational impotence.

Nauseated, Aya reminded himself to thank Birman for this later. "You're deeply fucked up, and I say this as someone with some experience of the condition."

"So why do you hate me so much? Do you just hate people in general, or is it personal to me?" Seiji smiled. "Did I make your sister a star?"

Aya fought his anger, knowing full well that Seiji sought to incite him to violence. Seiji wanted to be hit. If Aya started, he might not be able to stop.

Nothing would dissuade Seiji. He enjoyed verbal and physical abuse. In the absence of abuse, he would pick and prod until he incited it. No threats Aya could make would scare him, and Aya wasn't allowed to kill him. Aya, a master at driving people away, was powerless here. And Seiji kept staring at him, peeling back his skin, owning him....

Aya felt lightheaded, as if something pressed on his chest and the room had drained of oxygen. Panicky. This was stupid, since he'd faced far greater stresses than this. Seiji's victims had faced far worse than this. Yet he felt that pseudo-claustrophobia that sometimes plagued him since his home had exploded around him and partly buried him. Thankfully, he still had the dark shades hiding his eyes. He refused to gasp for air or show any signs. This was weakness.

"C'mon, how much to fuck you? Everybody has a price. Or you could fuck me. I bet you get rough when you're excited."

Enough. More than enough. Aya said, "I'm done here. I did my job, and I'm going." He turned to the door.

"You're going nowhere." Seiji tried to hit him, but Aya felt the blow approaching and grabbed Seiji's arm instead, wrenching him down and around into a submission hold. Undeterred, Seiji said, "If you leave, I'll have you hunted down."

"I sincerely doubt you'll be able to. Oh, Seiji, you'll find what you wanted on the 27th floor." Aya tapped the man's head against the wall just hard enough to stun him and walked out.

The woman he'd displaced glared at him. "Your time has come 'round again. Enjoy him," Aya said to her.

Steady, strong, he walked out, fending off hands and moving people out of his way when he had to. In the elevator, he stayed steady, uncertain if the camera system had been routed back to normal operation. Stand straight and breathe. Breathe in. Breathe out. He licked his lips, tasting the too sweet, pseudo-fruity tones of his lipgloss and feeling the texture of the sparkles against his tongue. He wanted to tug on Aya's earring, his reminder of why he did this shit to himself, but he wasn't wearing it.

Had he implicated Seiji enough? Had there really been bugs there to pick up that torturous meeting, to make this all worthwhile?

Seiji would die. He had to, and that had to be enough.

"Look at that bit of business," Yoji said, pointing his cigarette at the sidewalk as he drove.

"Too tired," Omi said, resting his head back against the seat, feeling dead. School was going to be fun tomorrow. No, this late it wouldn't be tomorrow anymore. Today.

"Walking around at 3 a.m. You think he's a professional?" Ken asked, but he didn't sound like he gave a damn. They'd all been knocked out by this mission.

Except for Aya, of course. It made Omi nervous to have Kritiker separate him from the team, since Aya had been so conflicted about returning.

"With how tight those pants are? Has to be."

"Don't you dare," Omi said.

"What? It's not like I have to pay for company. Whoa!" Yoji slammed on the brakes.

Omi's body rocked forward in its seatbelt, and he yelled, "Yoji!"

"Aya!" Yoji said.

Wow. It was Aya, standing on the sidewalk poised to defend himself from the noisy lunatics in the car that had just screeched to a halt next to him, but what had Aya gotten into? He'd been so made over that it looked like someone had pasted his face onto somebody else's body and head, then drawn on it. Omi stared at the hair and the straps and the makeup and the... the eyes. Aya had this expression in his eyes like he was lost somewhere miserable.

"What happened to you?" Omi asked.

"I've been to a party," Aya said softly, crazy-eyed.

Omi shivered. A mission gone wrong. It had to be.

"And decided to walk home?" Yoji asked.

"I felt like walking. I took the car service most of the way."

"Yeah, if we're using the service we have the car drop us off a few blocks away, but this is more than a few blocks."

"I felt like walking."

"Get in the car."

Omi watched Aya bristle at being commanded. The anger looked almost normal. Almost. "Please?" Omi asked.

Aya closed his eyes, then reached for the door handle and let himself in. Thankfully. Aya sat a distance away, but Omi noticed that some of the black makeup had been deliberately smudged, the line smeared by what looked like the heavy pressure of a thumb. The thumb smear almost looked like a crude stripe. Aya put his head back against the seat, exposing the pale curve of his throat and making the metal ring on his collar stand out more.

"What mission did they put you on?" Omi asked, trying to keep it as low key as possible while still getting information.

"They had me kill Miyamoto Hikari and implicate his pornographer son in the murder. I didn't look like myself or use my weapon doing it, but someone might somehow make the connection later, so you should know."

"How did you implicate him?" Yoji asked as he sucked hard on his cigarette.

"Talked to him as if he were my employer." Aya closed his eyes. "He's a child pornographer who grabs his 'stars' off the street. Or, rather, he was a child pornographer, since the crime family is supposed to execute him for patricide."

"And you weren't allowed to kill him yourself? What did you do to make Birman hate you that much?"

"I asked as much myself."

"Yoji, look at the road," Ken said.

"Yeah, yeah."

Omi shook his head. Yoji couldn't seem to tear his eyes off of Aya for long, not that Omi could entirely blame him for that. Meanwhile, Omi felt a little high just being near the scents rising from Aya's body and clothing. A drug den must have been on the itinerary.

Aya kept picking at the straps resting on his wrists and over his shirt in what looked like a nervous gesture. When he noticed Omi watching, he said, "I just want to get this off." Something about his posture suggested that he wanted to slide away to some place where no one could look at him.

"We're almost home." Omi wanted to pet Aya comfortingly, but everything about Aya screamed that any attempts to touch him would be answered with violence.

They spent the rest of the ride in tired silence, but as they walked up to their apartments, Yoji asked Aya's back, "How are you getting out of that getup? Hell, how did you get into it?"

"You think I was asking for it, dressed as I am?" Aya asked.

"Uh, what?"

"Enko helped me dress."

"Ick."

Aya turned on the stairs to face Yoji on the step below him, hooked his finger through the ring on his collar, and pulled on it. "Are you offering to help me out of it?" Then he turned back and walked up the stairs at greater speed.

"Hey, you didn't wait to hear a yes or no!"

"Yoji, give it up," Ken said.

"You think Kritiker whored him out?" Yoji asked quietly after Aya slammed the door to his apartment shut behind him.

"No!" Omi said, even as he thought of that very precise thumb mark on Aya's face.

"Like you said, Yoji, that outfit needs special effort to get in and out of," Ken said. "I don't think anyone touched those buckles since Enko."

"There's just something in his eyes. Aside from the colored contacts. I think we need to talk to Kritiker."

"I'm on it," Omi said.

It didn't take much effort to get Birman, as if she'd been waiting for them to contact her. Ken and Yoji had settled on the mission room's couch and chair, but Omi stood and vibrated a little. Sure enough, she said, "I thought you might call on me."

"What did you tell Aya to do to implicate the pornographer?" Yoji asked, his voice hard.

Birman looked surprised. "I told Aya to talk to him, freelancer to employer, nothing more. What are you implying?"

If she'd told Aya to be more... friendly, would she admit it? Would Aya? "We don't want you separating us onto different missions," Omi said. "We work better as a unit."

She looked annoyed. "You succeeded in your mission, and Aya succeeded in his. Besides, he was the last addition to your team, and you've worked without him before."

"We would have been more efficient with Aya. Each member of the team has a role to play."

"Are you dictating to me, Tsukiyono?"

"We are," Ken said.

Yoji said, "You took a guy whose beloved sister is missing and put him in a room with a man who kidnaps girls off the streets and rapes them, then told him he could only talk to the bastard. Aya came back looking bruised on the inside, and I put the blame on the person who put him up to it. You won't get what you want out of Aya if you break him."

"I thought he could handle it," she said.

"Don't try to make this Aya's fault," Omi said, his hands clenched into fists. "And don't mess with us." He noticed Yoji and Ken looking at him in surprise. They shouldn't. Friends were the family you chose, and Weiß was his.

"We'll keep your concerns in mind," she said dryly, looking annoyed and amused.

"You do that," Yoji replied.

"I think everything will run much smoother if we understand each other," Omi said, putting on a smile and a "can't we all work together?" look.

Aya hadn't realized that he'd become such a creature of habit and a slave to ritual. Usually he finished a mission kill night by caring for his katana and then washing the blood off himself. Once he finished those tasks, he could put the mission away and consider it done. The gun needed little cleaning, and his kills hadn't left a trace on him, which felt wrong. The water that ran off his body in the shower was black and eventually gray instead of red-tinged. Without his rituals, the mission felt unfinished.

Despite his best, concentrated efforts, he couldn't get all of the makeup off. His eyebrows looked bizarre, his eyes still had liner around them, and the "tribal" marks had left what looked like the shadow of tear tracks. Aya found the last to be grimly funny. His eyes hurt even with the contacts removed. The temptation to cut himself out of his outfit had been strong, but the memory of Seiji smiling over the thought of cutting the straps had made him unbuckle it all instead. The clothing he'd stuffed into a bag he tied off at the top. They stank of Seiji's crew's recreations.

After towel-drying his hair, Aya put his sister's earring back in, finding comfort in the familiar weight and swing, and let himself fall backward onto the bed. He missed her so much, and it terrified him that she was helpless in the hands of people who used her as currency, as Seiji would have had he seen her.

Did she feel pain and fear where she was, or did the coma grant her the mercy of feeling nothing?

Someone knocked at his door. He ignored it. The knocking continued. He let it go for five minutes, then stood and wrenched the door open, revealing a very hopeful looking Omi, eyes wide in preparation for entreating Aya to do something. "Omi, this better be good."

Aya looked like hell but more familiar, at least. Amazing how he'd looked so wrong without that one earring rendering him asymmetrical. The kohl lingering around Aya's eyes made them look sensually smoky or bruised depending on the angle you saw him at.

Yoji and Ken had let Omi handle this alone, since they didn't want to crowd Aya and Omi had the best luck at getting a good reaction out of him. "Your hair looks darker and duller in places," Omi said. "You still have some makeup on too."

"It'll wash out of my hair eventually. It's only hair. It's gone darker in the last two years anyway. As for the makeup, I already scrubbed my face raw, so I'll give it another try to tomorrow." His pale skin did look pink in places. Aya stared at Omi. "You're not going to leave until I talk about it, are you?"

"Pretty much."

Aya tugged lightly at his earring. "I'll do this once. Just once."

"That's fine."

Once Omi closed the door behind him, Aya sat on the bed. "Some people should never meet. Seiji felt that I could satisfy all of his needs and wants if I would only stay."

Omi sat beside him. "You made sure he knew you wouldn't, of course. You're good like that."

Aya almost smiled, then said, "Me wanting to stay would have violated his conception of what I was."

"That's so sick."

"What I am, the situation I was in, made him feel powerful in a way he'd rarely felt before. In my case, he looked at me and saw me, my cracks, what I am. He saw that I was a killer. He wanted me, and nothing I could do short of killing him would make him stop. None of my threats or coldness or nastiness worked, because he loved all of that and already owned me with his eyes. I was powerless, Omi."

"He sounds horrible."

At least Aya was talking. Sometimes it felt to Omi like Aya avoided talking out of an effort to negate his own existence through sheer will.

"You didn't see the tapes, which is something you should be thankful for. I got out easily compared to those girls. All he did to me was look at and talk to me."

"Birman showed you the tapes?" Knowing full well that Aya's comatose and now missing sister was the foundation of everything he did. Aya couldn't say no after that.

This kind of shit couldn't be allowed to happen again.

Aya shrugged. "One of them."

Omi couldn't pursue that, not without getting lost in a red haze of anger, so he went back to trying to help. "Aya, looks alone can be bad. Remembering the way my kidnappers had... touched me with their eyes and how it had gotten worse after my father refused to ransom me... well, I repressed all of that for most of my life for a reason. Or the way my brother's looks at me seemed to hit me just as hard as he--" He took a deep breath. "Looks can hurt."

"But that's reasonable. Those people meant you harm, and you knew it. Seiji was just... smarmy."

Omi doubted that, but he played along. "No one should be allowed to look at you but us."

Aya smiled a little, but then the phone rang. Soon after picking up the receiver, his face chilled again. "Yes. I'm glad." Silence fell as Aya listened for a while. "Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. Good night." He hung up.

"What?" Omi asked.

"Seiji is dead. His room was definitely bugged, given how fast the family moved. Birman said that they're also looking for an assassin named 'Tiger' now, which would be me." Aya's eyes took on that distant, somewhat crazy look again. "At least I succeeded. I worried that I'd left too soon. Birman sounded exasperated about something, though...."

Omi remembered again the crude stripe that someone--it must have been Miyamoto Seiji--had made in Aya's makeup, so he grabbed Aya's arm and rested his head against it. When Aya tried to flinch free, Omi clung, determined.

"Omi, did something go wrong with your mission? Omi?"

Let Aya assume whatever he wanted if it let Omi try to stealth comfort him. It worried him that Aya had so much contempt for his own pain, but none of them could seek professional help, not with their necessary secrets. Kritiker usually dealt fairly well with them but sometimes took an attitude that they were nothing more than weapons. Kritiker could use Aya's problems and obsessions to manipulate him, as they'd done here, so they wouldn't want him to be well.

Omi didn't see that as acceptable, not where his friends, his family, were concerned. When Weiß had disbanded after his uncle and Takatori Reiji's deaths, Omi had tried to live the normal kid life, responsible only for himself, and found it to be deeply unsatisfying, a ghost existence. He'd worried all the time and felt powerless and uncertain. Now that his family was back together, he refused to let anyone abuse or divide them. Omi couldn't be happy that Aya was with Weiß again if being here led to him being hurt like this, so nothing like this could be allowed to happen again.

"Omi?" Aya put his hand on top of Omi's head and stroked some of the hair away from his face. The gesture felt stiff and slightly clumsy, wrong with Aya's assassin grace. Aya was nearly all weapon already.

"I just want to stay for a while. Can I do that?"

"I'm tired, Omi."

"Please?"

"How will you wake up for school?"

"I'm young."

Aya sighed and stroked his hair again, smoother this time. "Okay."

A victory, if a grudging one. Omi curled in closer, willing Aya to see him as a little sister substitute. After all the times people had mistaken him for a girl, he might as well get some use out of his looks. Aya needed working on, needed to be more integrated into the team, so this divide and conquer thing Kritiker had tried couldn't work. Weiß would never have let him do this mission on the terms Birman had set down, and Kritiker had to have known this.

Weiß needed to be more alert in the future.

"Omi, can you help me find out for sure that Seiji is really dead?" Aya asked quietly.

"Yeah. Of course." If Omi had to become more personally involved with and snoop around Kritiker to keep them safe and well, he'd do that. Whatever it took.

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

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