Part 2
Sena was gone.
Affirmation of his suspicions made it real, and the reality sent a flash burn of awareness through Ken's system, shocking him into motion even before it registered that the buzz from the painkillers was gone, adrenaline eating away at their affects as his endocrine system kicked in on overdrive. He'd ripped his IVs out before he'd even realized he was moving, ignoring Omi's shocked cry as he dragged himself up over the banister in the hospital bed, yanked Takatori-san out of the cheap faux leather visitor's chair by the lapels of his too-expensive dress shirt and informed him that if he did not check Ken out of that godforsaken hospital that minute, someone innocent was going to pay for it.
He fucking well needed to kill something.
Of course he'd never gotten to say goodbye. Those were for real people, with lives and boring desk jobs and heath insurance policies tight enough to insure that they had the money to die in their beds at home surrounded by half a dozen grandkids. Assassins didn't get time for flowery goodbyes, even when they were the ones driving the blades through the heart of that most special person and goddamnit, he'd wanted it this time -- those last few moments to hold his lover and tell him that everything was alright in the end because he was loved and that was more than most people got when they lived to be fucking eighty.
It didn't matter now, because Sena had apparently spent those last few minutes with Aya, bleeding out all over the floor of that stupid school as his mother looked on, oblivious to the great gaping hole she'd just punched in her own universe until just before Abyssinian drove his blade through her gut, waking up just in time to recognize her dear Takeru-kun and beg Aya to kill her like he wasn't hell bent on doing it already. She was lucky, by all accounts (or at least what he'd managed to wrangle out of Omi on the way back to Aya's apartment) Aya'd been damn near gentle with the woman, as gentle as it was possible to be when eviscerating someone anyway, which was a damn sight more than Ken would have allowed her if anyone had bothered to tell him what was going on before they shipped him off to the hospital.
He was trying not to be bitter that the woman who'd put a fucking bullet in Sena on two separate occasions got to die holding him, when all he had left was whatever of his lover Aya'd managed to dredge up from the ruins of the academy before the med evac team arrived on the scene for Yohji. He'd probably get a personal effect or two and a promise from Persia that a neat little placard would be placed somewhere on the new school site (because of course they were rebuilding the school, successful institution that it was) with Kisaragi Takeru sketched out in flowery script, maybe an inspirational phrase below it, some cheap ass variation on a theme of 'Whoops, this one died kinda young' that'd make new students wonder what the story behind it all was.
A stranger's name sketched out on enemy territory made a crappy memorial to a White Hunter, not that anyone gave a damn what he thought.
It was surreal. He'd woken up that morning intending to strip the kid bare and make sure neither of them remembered there even was a mission, spent the afternoon convincing Sena that no, there really wasn't anything else so pressing that they needed to be wasting precious time on it before they both headed off to risk life and limb on one of the most poorly executed missions Ken had seen in his time at Kritiker, and that was saying something. He'd spent the rest of the time praying that the hollow feeling in his gut was indigestion, that life was not about to kick him upside the head and rearrange his universe again by yet another careful leveling of everything he cared about. Most of him hadn't really believed the worst would happen, and that was stupid because the worst always did.
He kept coming back to the part where Sena was seriously, permanently gone, and something inside him ached, clawing to get out, needing release and he really was going to have to find something to kill soon or he was going to turn on Omi and he really did not want to find out which one of them would win that fight. More than that, he didn't want to be the one standing over the corpse when Aya came home and he sure as hell didn't want to make Aya take him out so soon after everyone else had abandoned them.
Not that he might not have to anyway. Ken had a horrible feeling he was about to pull a Yohji and sink right on into the crazier-than-thou deep end.
Still, he could hold it in for a bit longer, at least until Aya came home as Omi assured Ken he would and soon, each time Ken started to shift his attention towards the door. He was currently forcing his attention to stay on the patterns in Aya's carpet, the ugliest shade of olive green he'd ever seen flecked with half a dozen shades of bright orange and brown speckles, wondering how he'd never noticed the horrendousness of it with all the times that he'd been here. Omi was fidgeting in the kitchen, bustling around preparing tea like either of them had any intention of drinking it, and Ken suspected that last promise to seriously harm Omi if he didn't shut the fuck up had hit its mark a little more firmly than he'd intended.
He was trying not to blame the entire thing on Omi. It wasn't really the other man's fault anyway, Sena knew most of what he was getting himself into even if they'd all been utterly convinced the kid hadn't a clue how to actually execute Kritiker protocol long enough to keep himself out of trouble, and they'd all failed him letting him run off after Kisaragi Fumie like that. Persia had orchestrated the entire thing, but he'd expected them to smack him if he crossed the line and not one of them had bothered to address the fact that they'd already gotten one of their cohorts killed using the guy as bait and maybe trying it a second time wasn't going to turn out so well as they'd hoped. Didn't change the fact that Omi'd crossed that big black line in the sand that separated righteousness from the dark side of the force, but they'd been stupid to think that anyone could survive in the house of the Takatori zaibatsu and not take that last great leap into moral ambiguity.
Didn't change the fact that Ran was probably horrified and about to Lysistrata him over it either, and Omi knew it. He'd apologized dozens of times since they'd left the hospital, cried and railed and begged Ken's forgiveness, offered his life in exchange for the debt and in the end Ken had had to threaten to take him up on the offer just to get him to stop talking because the man just didn't seem to understand that this wasn't about him. It didn't really matter if he'd known how important Sena was to Ken (which he hadn't, apparently, as those bitchy reports Aya'd been sending to Kritiker hadn't said anything about the change in their relationship), because it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in the way things went down and in the end it didn't save Omi from whatever abyss he was falling into or Sena from the fate he'd so cheerfully sent the kid to face.
It didn't save any of them.
He was still staring at the carpet when Aya finally ambled in, didn't even bother looking up when the door clicked quietly shut, or during the round of furious whispers exchanged as Omi went to greet his lover. Carpet was good, carpet was... shaggy? Ken blinked for a moment, reaching out to pet the fibers at his feet and trying to wrap his mind around the fact that not only was Aya's sense of interior decorating apparently colorblind it was also strangely retro. In the more conventional, completely unattractive way of homes owned by people with far too busy lives to bother updating their horribly out of date styles and wow did he need to stop hanging out in flower shops with gay guys or he was never going to be able to speak in public again with that kind of thought process.
He started when the couch dipped next to him, the weight of his teammate's body as the older man all but threw himself down with a tired sigh slanting him sideways for a moment before the momentum from Aya's little controlled fall dispersed. Ken blinked, turning to find Aya hunched over next to him, ridiculously close for someone who usually insisted on a decent amount of personal space, pale hands fisted over his knees as he leaned heavily against them. Aya was watching him, shimmers of indigo and violet visible between the shorn fringe of his hair where it fell into his eyes, serious as always but without that extra layer of ice, of unflappability Ken usually associated with Aya, less remote and more simply... tired.
"I'm sorry," Aya said finally, after he'd stared long enough to make Ken start to fidget embarrassingly in his seat. "About the way it went down. It's my fault they didn't tell you, I didn't think you'd let us treat your wounds if you knew."
"Damn straight, I wouldn't have," he replied automatically, but there wasn't much bite behind the retort.
It was one thing to rail and rage at Omi, who despite the newly budding addition to his collection of guilt complexes had no real connection to the tragedy he'd caused, hadn't known Sena well enough to care beyond the most oblique sense that the boy had died. It was another to take it out on Aya, who for all his attempts at keeping a distance had cared about Sena almost as much as Ken had, looked haggard and reluctant in a way he hadn't seen Ran since the day they'd walked away from the car where Manx was tending to his suddenly very conscious sister. Aya was grieving too, he realized with a start, watching the older man's back stiffen at a particularly loud noise from the kitchen, attention wavering for a moment as Omi prattled about doing God only knew what in an effort to be unobtrusive. Worse than Sena's loss, Aya was facing the prospect of losing Omi for good as well, the pressures of remaining inside the Takatori household and still maintaining some semblance of morality taking its toll on the younger man and they all knew what would happen if he ever really betrayed their purpose, what Omi had made Aya promise to do before he'd gone and gotten himself so entangled.
"Don't make me bitch you out in his place, Ken," Aya replied, gaze considering. "He wouldn't have wanted you to die back there just to be near a corpse."
And he probably would have died, given the extent of the damage to his gut, the heavy wrappings constricting his breathing where they bunched around his midsection. At the very least going to the hospital saved Aya the guilt of having killed him on top of everything else. He found himself grateful for that, if nothing else, watching Aya almost flinch at another clang from the kitchen, attention shifting helplessly for a moment before he seemed to give up altogether and turned to throw Ken a sardonic look.
"Want to go for a drink?"
"Oh fuck yes."