It was always dark when they went out for missions. Most of the undercover work was in daylight, doing their jobs around the school, keeping an eye out for strange behavior or clues to where information might be hidden, but missions were always at night. Sometimes he wondered if the others got that irony. The White Hunters moved in the dark.
He knew next to nothing about the other Weiß. Aya, Sena, the shadowy Persia; and there were still more, two of them, working somewhere else for the moment, but what they were doing he had never been told, and it wasn't his right to pry. He hadn't joined for companionship or to do good, only for cold and simple revenge, and there was no need to go further into things than what he was told unless it stopped him from getting what he wanted.
Lately, though, what he wanted had been getting a little more complicated than he liked.
He hardly knew Aya and Sena, but any blind man could see what there was between the two of them. Sena was so full of youth and bright energy, always moving, always needing something new to throw everything into, that Kyou couldn't help feeling sorry for their elder in Weiß, the man he had looked up to since joining the group. Fujimiya Aya was a paradox, a secret in himself. He wasn't the kind of person Kyou would have marked for getting involved with a sixteen-year-old boy, much less someone as intent on giving away the relationship as Izumi Sena seemed to be. Yet something about the way Aya let Sena bounce off of him, the way he tolerated the thousands of revealingly loving touches the boy was so fond of with stoic silence and sometimes even a hint of a smile when he thought no one was looking, made Kyou feel secure in his first assessment of the other man. What exactly they had in each other he didn't know, but it wasn't anything he needed to protect Sena from.
He didn't really know himself why he was always wanting to protect the younger Weiß. He understood that part of him saw the boy as someone like his brother, headstrong and righteous in his pursuit of what he considered 'good', and that even though Sena was an assassin there would always be something about him that needed to be handled. At first Sena had been hard to work with because of it, because of what Kyou could see whenever he looked at him, but gradually he had gotten numb to it. That wasn't the main picture anymore. It was something more now than just keeping an eye on someone who reminded him of Susumu.
But he was realistic. Even if Sena hadn't had Aya, which he did, and even if he hadn't been a highschooler, which he was, Kyou would never have had a chance at him. Not because Sena would reject him, but because he couldn't let himself have a chance. His goal didn't allow for sidetracks, and he wasn't really sure that he approved of having relationships within the team anyway. Those kinds of emotional strings during a bad moment were a risk that could get everyone involved killed. So maybe that was part of the reason why he liked to be with Aya, and not Sena, while they were out at night doing their secret work. Maybe that was why this of all things bothered him.
Maybe all of his carefully laid out reasons were just a spider's web of lies to make himself feel better.
Maybe, he was just too afraid.
-------------------------------When school let out, Aya and Sena came home separately, but they always ended up meeting in front of the house and coming in together as if they had walked the whole way like that, with Sena chattering cheerfully or lost in thought depending on what kind of a day it had been and Aya next to him, balancing books or paperwork to be done and letting him speak or not speak as he liked as if it really didn't matter. Aya didn't coddle, like a man might with a girl, and Sena always ended up working out his problems on his own, but there was that something between them that made even a lack of interference supportive. Sena rarely seemed very upset about being ignored.
On this particular day Sena had come home in a good mood, trailing a more sedate Aya behind him. He shed his school uniform and books up in his room in two seconds flat, rushed through his part of the household chores like a whirlwind of excited energy (or someone who was going somewhere), and was upstairs again in ten minutes, clattering around until the ceiling sounded like it might come through. Kyou was in the living room right underneath, trying to go through that morning's newspaper. Even he, who was used to living with a noisy, fast-paced teenage boy and had once been one himself, was about ready to move before the abuse became too much for the poor ceiling when Sena came clattering back down the stairs.
"Aya..." the brown-headed boy started in, and Kyou moved his paper enough so that he could see around it discreetly. He knew that tone. When Sena used that, there was something he wanted, and he would do almost anything he had to do to get it.
Aya was on the couch across from Kyou's chair, methodically going over the completed test sheets he had brought back with him. (He had been reclothed and sitting there grading things for as long as Sena, without all the clattering, but that was nothing unusual for Fujimiya Aya.) Sena's sights swung and fixed on him. Kyou could see the wheels turning behind blue eyes.
"So, teacher, I guess you wouldn't consider canceling this assignment," Sena cajoled innocently, leaning over Aya's shoulder until their faces brushed against each other by the tiniest fraction of a centimeter. He was holding a sheet of paper in one hand, waving it like a pet owner with a snack for the cat. Aya's head shook; his attention didn't leave his own work by so much as a millimeter. The teenager tried again, a little more sweetly this time.
"Special circumstances?"
Aya's quiet violet eyes turned to look at him before turning right back to their business without blinking.
"I need the assignment to file," he said, avoiding looking at the curly-headed Weiß so well that Kyou would never have known he wasn't talking to himself if he hadn't already heard the beginning of the discussion. "Do it. It shouldn't take you more than an hour to write if you begin now."
For Aya that was a blatant no, and Sena's face fell.
"But-" he started, and Kyou watched out of the corner of one eye for one of the flares of temper Sena was famous for. Sena was all hands-on, so subterfuge only lasted just so long. Kyou would still be surprised that he hadn't accidentally spilled to that girl he'd been so involved with in his first week inside Koua Gakuen, except that Sena, Kyou had learned, was deathly serious about their work. He would have had a tantrum if he ever found out that Kyou had doubted him, but sometimes it was hard to separate the teenager wheedling less homework out of Aya from his hard-eyed, no-nonsense (just as reckless) counterpart.
But right now there was no mission to save Aya from a long, determined debate.
The corners of Sena's mouth turned under in the beginnings of a stubborn, frustrated grimace. A muscle in the lining of his eyes, just beneath the left one's inner corner, twitched. Kyou suddenly felt stupid cataloguing all of this and turned his head back to his newspaper, which was why, when the next sentence to find his ears was not an argument but something of much softer nature, it caught him off balance enough that he lost his composure.
"Aya... aren't there more important things we could be doing? I could be researching..."
Kyou's eyes were drawn against his will to the sudden display of even-tempered grace that was taking up most of the back of the couch and draping itself with pleading care across Aya's shoulders. His newspaper dropped an inch or so in sheer surprise at the sight of willfully expressive heat darkening his sixteen-year-old housemate's eyes. Research was quite obviously the furthest thing from Izumi Sena's mind.
There was a pause; then, "You could," Aya said. His expression was as inscrutable as it had been before, but it was plain to see that the play of words hadn't escaped him. Even more than what had come from Sena, this response wasn't at all what Kyou had been expecting from a perfectly normal afternoon; the shock was so deep that the decision to get up was subconscious, immediate and urgent. The newspaper fell behind him with a crinkling sound of pages folding back into place and landed on the couch. He headed for his room and privacy.
On his way up the stairs he had to concentrate on the light thud of his own footsteps to keep his head from flying off into dazed oblivion. In the living room... what was Sena thinking? What was Aya thinking? Aya had never made an advance, of any kind, in public before, not even just holding hands or casual touches, and neither had Kyou ever seen him respond to any of Sena's. Why then would he start now, all of a sudden?
Kyou's door was the third one from the top of the stairs with Sena's next to it and Aya's across the hallway. In light of what he'd just had to face, Kyou kept his back to that particular door-that was the one Sena's light footsteps always crept toward late at night when they had all gone to bed, at least on nights when both Sena and Aya did go to bed. With Aya so engrossed in their mission as to be obsessive and Sena chasing some lead of his own, that wasn't anywhere near an every night occurance. Even so, it stung. Kyou wasn't even sure why.
He needed to have something to do, that was it, something to take his mind off of what was probably going on in the living room just a few meters behind him. His room could do with a little cleaning; he had liked to keep things in order before he'd joined the Weiß, but ever since then things had been so busy that the state of his room had gone by the wayside. Well, now he had time. He would do what he could with it, and after that, if it didn't take long enough, he would go to the laundry room and do his laundry before it filled up the basket in the corner and started overflowing onto the floor. And sometime between now and then, he would have to get over whatever emotional baggage had built up between he and Sena, before their missions spiraled down into the hard and dirty parts and it was too late.
It took a while to clean up the mess that had collected over the last week or so, and not long enough by Kyou's measure. He was hardly a blushing virgin himself, though he admitted that he'd never even considered other men as bed partners; at least not back before Sena. Even so, the gender of a partner really couldn't change the length of a make-out session by much. Ten minutes didn't seem right if the look Sena had been wearing was any indicator to go by-Kyou had spent more time than that on a quick diversion when he was Sena's age.
He gathered up the basket in the corner, piled the rest of what clothes he'd found lying around and beneath his bed on top of its contents, and headed gingerly down the stairs, past the mercifully quiet living room toward the narrower hallway behind the little kitchen. The laundry room was all the way in the back of the tiny house, and well used to being used for a place of thought since all of them needed a quiet minute now and then. Usually, the chugging of the washer blocked all other sound out and it was easy to block out itself once you got the hang of it.
The door was closed, so he sat down his basket in the hallway and opened it, the knob clicking under his hand as it turned. His gaze, trained to instinctual wariness by months of having to keep himself alive, scanned the room like it always did when he went into one and found staring back at him the same scene he had been trying to avoid. He had an impression of tumbled red water, a thin brown arm, and a graceful white curve with darker tracery picked out on it in the faded pink of old scar tissue before his eyes could tear themselves away and look at the faces attached.
Sena went scarlet at the same time as Kyou, but being trapped beneath Aya, couldn’t relieve the situation with a polite departure. Kyou started to do it for him.
"Kyou, stop."
It wasn't the words, but the commanding tone they were delivered in that stopped him. Kyou took a deep breath and opened his mouth, but he refused to turn around, leaving his back to present a stiff front to the room behind him.
"I apologise," he told Aya as calmly as he could, swallowing around the cold lump of shock still in his throat and wanting badly to say something else, something that might soothe the hot flush of shame working over Sena's face and his own. Nothing came to mind except the long, white curve of Aya's back and the glimpse of twin swells beyond, which naturally did not help.
"I'll go now," he managed finally after an interminable amount of time just standing there like the worst of fools, Aya's violet stare and Sena's embarrassed blue one boring into his shoulders, and he'd started off once more toward the open, beckoning door when again, Aya's voice stopped him.
"Come here."
He shut his eyes. Did he have to make this worse? "Aya..."
There was the sound of an impatient snort, Sena's tentative breathing soft beneath it. Aya was daring him to turn around, to look again, but for the life of him Kyou couldn't do it. He didn't need to. The image of his teammates lying there, tanned skin and white patchworked together so naturally, like they were a single creature, was burned into his head as clearly as if he were still staring at them. It was all he could do just to push it to the back of his head without Aya demanding whatever it was that he wanted in that cool, self-assured way of his.
"Just come here."
He wanted to. There was a humiliating flush of heat spreading from his face downwards as the picture nudged insistantly at the edges of his inner eye, torturing him with what he knew he couldn't have. Sena was Aya's, and Aya...well.
Still, if it wasn't, it wasn't. What had he just decided? There was no way to get over it except by facing it. Kyou pulled in a deep breath, forced his face into a neutral expression, and turned around.
The real picture was both better and worse than his imagination had made it. Aya's long dark red hair was spread out in waving fans over and around the pair on the floor, loosed from its usual braid, but though it covered all of Sena except for the thin curves of his legs and the arms trapped above his head, it was covering very little of Aya. Kyou had never realised before that their leader was so curved. The long, fine-muscled body pinning Sena's to the floor was definitely not feminine, yet there was that continually sweeping line to the form that Kyou had always associated with beautiful women, and now that he thought of it, this was the way in which Aya fought: wielding his katana in endless arcs, like clear water flowing from stone to stone on its way to the sea.
He had to swallow hard before he could look the other Weiß in the face.
"Why are you going?" Aya said. His voice was as still, as quietly unconcerned as the lavendar pools of his eyes. Kyou swallowed again, this time because his mouth was too dry.
"What do you mean," he said back, trying to convert the liquid heat pooling in his guts into something more constructive, but the irritated tone that was meant to be in the words fell so flat that even the question mark faded into nothingness. The sentence died, leaving the dust-bitter taste of defeat on the back of his already dry tongue. Aya's expression stayed.
"Isn't this what you wanted?"
Yes. He didn't say it out loud but he could hear it anyway, echoing off the walls of the room just as if he had, and Aya seemed to hear it too. He seemed... satisfied, somehow.
"Come here," he said for the third time, and this time, Kyou obeyed. His legs felt like they were doing it on their own, dragging to something he was sure he didn't want to face, and in spite of not wanting to look any more at Aya, he was too afraid to look down at Sena. He let his vision linger on the cool violet of Aya's eyes instead as he crossed the room in deafening silence, the mouse-soft sounds of his socks against the tile floor painful in their obviousness.
"Sit," Aya commanded, still soft-voiced, when Kyou had reached their neat tangle of limbs and red hair. Kyou lowered himself to the floor in front of them, still avoiding the sight of the long, almost feline body laid out beyond him or the wide-eyed gaze of their youngest member, which was fixed on him like the glass eyes of a doll.
"Kiss him," said Aya.
Kyou felt his eyes widen, then narrow, and he started to protest, but Aya cut him off again as coolly as he might suggest a newer strategic angle during mission planning. "That is what you wanted, isn't it? And what he wants. So, do it. I won't mind."
"It would be taking what isn't mine," Kyou pointed out levelly. "What does it matter if you mind or not?"
Aya shook his head. "He can't be entirely mine if a part of him is yours," he said, so calm in saying what most lovers would have had a fit over that Kyou might have considered the whole thing a prank if his voice hadn't been so perfectly serious.
"Kiss him."
It still didn't feel right, but Aya's tone made clear that the decision was already made and set in unbreakable stone. Kyou lowered his face toward Sena's and went ahead.
There was no taste of roses or fruit or any of that kind of romantic flavour, but there was Sena, and that was better than any food or drink in the world. It was the same as the scent he had caught on the boy when enough time had passed after his last bath that he no longer smelled like soap and not quite enough that he reeked, and however unromantic that analogy might seem, it was part of what had attracted Kyou at the first. He had never noticed a woman's scent with the same preciseness as he now noticed Sena's taste, his smell, the little twitches at the corners of his eyes when he got angry, and the way those same corners crinkled when the brightest, realest and best of his smiles came out. He had never memorised them the way he had memorised Sena's. In fact, he was so caught up in the kiss that he forgot all about even Aya. For one uplifted minute he and the boy he had come to love were alone, and the only people they belonged to were themselves and each other. Not Kritiker, not Persia...
But every thing, good or bad, comes to an end. It felt like forever and not long enough when the need for air drove him up where reality could rush back in like the warm air of the laundry room into his starved lungs, though it had probably not been more than a minute and Aya was still sitting there as proof of it, watching, his face as smooth and expressionless as the stone one of a statue. It felt like a long time before anyone said anything again.
"Sena," Aya said finally. In one sinuous movement he sat up so that he was straddling the younger boy, then slid to the side in a flash of long white legs and a cloud of tangled russet hair, freeing Sena and baring him at the same time. Sena curled onto his side and bent his knees up over himself. His face was flushed, whether from embarrassment, remnants of the heat from their activities, or both, Kyou didn't know.
The redhead sat up easily, his back straight and unconcerned, neither trying to hide nor trying to show his complete nudity. His left hand reached out with more tenderness than Kyou had ever seen Aya use and cupped the right side of Sena's face-the one not pressed against the floor. For the first time that day he posed a question that needed an answer, and it was not to Kyou.
"Are you certain?"
Sena licked his lips; Kyou could just see from his seat the tip of the pink tongue take one quick swipe and retreat, and when his mouth had closed again Sena nodded. As if to prove his sincerity, he cast a short, deliberate glance at Kyou to catch his eye before he would look back at his partner. It was a shy glance, but a determined one too, and Kyou felt a surge of anticipation, not all of it good.
There was no question for Kyou. Aya and Sena washed over him like a wave, and after that there was no more room for thought beyond the pure sensation clouding his brain.
-------------------------------"He was going somewhere," Aya said, running a long hand through nut brown curls. Sena had fallen asleep not long after they'd finished and now he was stretched out on his belly between Kyou and the redhead with his face pressed into Kyou's chest, Aya's left arm clutched possessively to his own narrower one. His breath on Kyou's skin was hot and strangely comforting.
"I know."
"I didn't plan this," Aya went on quietly, like that sentence went somehow with the first. It didn't, yet Kyou knew instantly what he meant and nodded.
"I know," he repeated, neither of them looking at the other.
"He's wanted it for a long time; I watched the both of you, dancing around each other. He wouldn't admit to it until not long ago. The dance becomes tiring." A sigh, and the dark red head slid free of the hand that had been propping it up, settling lightly on an indent in the curve of Sena's neck. "I know that this is not what you wanted. You love him. But you wanted to stay alone, to have nothing holding you back from your goal; to be able to throw your life at the mercy of fate in the pursuit of that goal and not regret or hesitate. And that was as impossible yesterday as it is now. To love someone is to be trapped, Kyou. You were trapped already from the minute you set your eyes on him."
Vaguely Kyou nodded again. "Yes," he said in a bare minimum of sound, and the tone of the word seemed to appease Aya. They lay there together for a few minutes more in silence, separated by the soft curve of Sena's sleeping body.
"Do you ever regret it?" he murmured finally into the empty air. Aya would know what he meant.
There was a beat more of silence; then Aya laughed quietly.
"I didn't accept him because I wouldn't regret it. There are moments, when I don't. Most of the time..." He allowed that to trail off into nothing before beginning on a new sentence. "He should know something other than killing, and he deserves a chance to feel love. Whether it turns out well or badly... he deserves that chance."
There wasn't an answer to that, so Kyou stayed silent, his fingers roving the smooth skin of Sena's hip. No scars here, not yet. A few years and there would be scars everywhere, if any of them lived so long. Aya didn't appear to think so. Kyou himself couldn't find a good omen anywhere in their situation. Whatever was going on inside Koua Gakuen ran too deep, like a tree whose outside looked fine but whose core was rotten, and the coming of Kritiker would be like a flood, knocking the last weak illusions of sanity away until the fine cover that had been holding the madness in was destroyed. It would be better than luck if Weiß escaped being caught in the collapse. They had gone so far in their secrecy, involving themselves in the lives of the people caught inside that not one of them could help or warn or protect, and when the time came to watch most of those lives go up in flames, could they? The little loves and friendships they had made, would they bind them there, making them into pieces of broken driftwood themselves? If they were trapped like that, they would never get back out.
Yet if they did, Kyou would be free once more, his mission done. He had never considered that. Were there possibilities then?
Who had mandated that an assassin couldn't fall in love, if he fell in love with one of his own kind?