part 276: "You just used my actual name. Have things gotten this bad?"
Previous installments are available in my Memories here. Please make sure the Memory page is set to sort by Description to get the entries in the closest-to-correct order.
"Glass Houses" part 276/?
By Viridian5
4/2003 - present
RATING: R. If m/m interaction bothers you, pass this by. AU.
SPOILERS: Glühen.
SUMMARY: After Aya's sister dies, Schwarz tries to save themselves and Aya from the mistakes of the Dramatic CDs and Glühen Schwarz tries to save him from himself--for their own reasons, of course--and neither they nor Weiß are ever the same again.
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: No, not yet. This is a trial run of a piece of an unfinished fic.
DISCLAIMERS: All things Weiß Kreuz belong to Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiß, Polygram k.k., and Animate Film. No infringement intended.
NOTES: Thanks to rosaleendhu and red_squared for audiencing, typo-watch, and encouragement. Thanks to 'nat for "puisín," which she says probably sounds like "pu-sheen." Inspirational music includes Covenant's United States of Mind, mayatawi's V Mix the Second CD (Jane Jensen, Kidneythieves, Poe's rock version of "Hello," Kristen Barry's "Ordinary Life," Lacuna Coil), Linkin Park's Meteora, A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step, Pigface's Easy Listening..., Shriekback's "The Bastard Sons of Enoch," Zeromancer's Eurotrash, and Neuroticfish's Les Chansons Neurotiques.
I am not responsible for any therapy bills incurred as a result of trauma from doing research on things mentioned in this story. If you look up, say, "butter dog porn" on your own, I refuse to take the blame. I've been told that it's a bad idea to eat soup or drink while reading "Glass Houses."
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"Glass Houses" part 276
By Viridian5
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Feeling surprisingly melancholy, Schuldig sat at the kitchen table of his new apartment and looked out the window at the heavy gray winter sky, wondering if it’d get any decent sunlight to bask in in months to come. He didn’t know how long they’d be living here, which didn’t usually bother him. From his teens on, the only place he’d steadily lived in for a long period of time was Rosenkreuz, and he’d very sensibly wanted to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. After that he’d done the nomadic thing with Brad and eventually the rest of Schwarz and adopted a be-in-the-moment attitude by necessity, letting Brad, who usually had more information from Eszett or his precognition than Schuldig had, do the planning ahead.
(He played long games with some people’s minds without Brad’s orders, but those had been for sport, hobbies, trivial. If they failed or ended too soon they annoyed him a bit but didn’t put him out for long. Besides, there were always other fish in the sea, and the sea was endless.)
But now he wasn’t content to be a leaf in the wind anymore. He *wanted* to plan ahead and have some expectation of where he’d be in, say, six months. He... wanted to do something that *mattered*, that lasted.
He had no idea where the hell any of this had come from.
His most recent big plan hadn’t succeeded. He’d so wanted Schwarz to enjoy their time off and see the rejuvenating power of a good vacation to get them to go on them more often. Despite all the traveling he’d done in his life, he still had so many places he wanted to see and be in. Some locations he’d gone on a job didn’t count from the proscribed route of places there his work had limited him to.
Unfortunately, Schwarz had fallen apart without jobs to stop them from thinking and tell them what to do and needed a kind of vacation from their vacation. They’d even ruined *Schuldig’s* vacation by forcing him to work. Everything had been such a disaster he doubted they’d try it again for a very long time, if ever.
If Schuldig did get the private vacation Brad had promised, he’d be appreciative (and somewhat surprised). It wouldn’t be the same, though, not without his peeps, his gang, his in-house entertainment.
In almost every way, their Jamaica trip felt like a defeat. None of them came back rested or rejuvenated, and Schuldig knew he wasn’t alone in feeling jet-lagged and no longer adjusted to winter and its cold.
Ironically, Schuldig himself currently had too much time to think. Moving in hadn’t taken long because they didn’t actually have much to move. They all had possessions scattered across Asia, Europe, and parts of North America, jettisoned when they became inconvenient, and bought what they needed when they needed it. Schwarz had to travel light.
Both Brad and Schuldig had found Brad’s call to Persia disappointing and anticlimactic too, having looked forward to bullying Persia into doing what they wanted, fighting for a win, with Brad saying with a Crawford smile that he loved to play the villain to support his team. But Persia had given in on paying for Nagi’s efforts immediately, claiming he had no idea the e-mail account had exploded like that. Of course he wouldn’t take advantage of Prodigy. Schuldig had been tempted to mindread Persia to see if all that was bullshit, but Persia had Katsura on duty protecting his mind and Schuldig didn’t feel like taking the time and effort of discreetly breaking in just to satisfy his curiosity on something so small. The phone call took just a few minutes, and Nagi’s new work agreement came through by e-mail soon after that. Disappointing, though it pleased Nagi to face so little friction.
After that Nagi went to his new bedroom to work on his computer alone, while Brad left to return their old apartment’s keys to the landlord, which shouldn’t take long. It left Schuldig at loose ends. He didn’t have enough time to really get into anything, just enough to get bored and melancholy.
Maybe having some of the kids move out into their own place, even if it *was* right next door, even though Nagi would still live with him and Brad, had something to do with his weird mood. Maybe, but Schuldig didn’t really see himself as suffering from empty nest syndrome, even if it might be fun to joke with Brad about how they didn’t even have a kids’ room they could convert into a rec room or walk-in closet. But things *were* changing....
Self-analysis *sucked*, but every telepath had to do it periodically to figure out where their ideas and drives came from.
A sudden blast of regret/fear/confusion/panic/self-directed anger jolted Schuldig, and it had Farfarello’s unique mental flavor to it, even if Farfarello seldom felt some of those emotions. What the hell had happened? Schuldig reached out and found Snow-white and Rose-red at a local cemetery. Something there had unexpectedly set Farfarello off but Schuldig couldn’t pick up fine details under the deluge of feelings and Farfarello’s desperate attempts to repress and deny. Plus, reading Farfarello at the moment felt like sticking his hand in an operating garbage disposal, all darkness, stench, and sharp slicing and grinding blades. Schuldig backed off and waited to see what happened.
Farfarello couldn’t repress successfully and put up a front Aya saw right through then argued and bullied Aya into going to see Yoji. Topsy-turvy day indeed. Even more worrying, Farfarello didn’t follow Aya to Kitten in the House to skulk about outside stalking them or find a way to get inside and put himself between them, which would be his usual two choices. Instead, Farfarello was rushing back to the apartments intending to get Schuldig to fix whatever had gone wrong.
Shit. Maybe no longer getting a room they could lock from the outside had been premature. It probably wouldn’t get to that point, but it’d sure make Schuldig feel better if he knew he had the option of throwing Farfarello into a secured room.
Farfarello better not make a mess. They’d just gotten this apartment.
Schuldig hid his gun under the newspaper on the table, in reach, and a knife up each sleeve. ~ Nagi, Farfarello is coming back in a major lather. Don’t come out of your room, draw attention to yourself, or restrain him when he gets here but be ready to intervene if things sound like they’re going bad or I call for you. He’s dissociated from his body, so make sure your mental shields are strong since he’s acting more and more like a telepath these days. ~
~ Do you expect things to go bad? ~ Nagi asked.
~ He’s unpredictable at his best, and right now he’s in a lot of emotional tumult and unsure how to deal with it. He’s coming to me for help but if he’s not happy with how that’s going.... Better for us to be safe than sorry. ~
~ Understood. ~
As he waited for Farfarello to get back and explode all over everything, Schuldig found himself wishing that Brad would return already. Why should he have to face this kind of problem by himself?
If things went to hell too quickly, Schuldig would act on his own initiative and make his own decisions on dealing with Farfarello, and they might not be what Crawford would prefer. If Crawford didn’t like the consequences, he should have foreseen this and been here to intervene.
The keys turned loudly in the lock, then Farfarello opened the door in a rush and slammed it shut. He tossed his black umbrella to the side, obviously not caring where it landed, and strode forward until he stopped at the end of the table opposite from Schuldig, his single tawny eye blazing with emotion, his gloved hands clenching on the back of a chair. He radiated crisp winter cold. “Schuldig,” he said, his voice deep, dark, and almost agonized.
“You just used my actual name. Have things gotten this bad?” Schuldig didn’t let his surprise or anxiety show in his face or surface thoughts.
“I’m not here for you to break my mind. The opposite.” But instead of saying anything more he just breathed hard.
“The suspense is killing me. What is this about? I expected you to be interfering with Aya’s reunion with Yoji.”
“I would far prefer that myself.” Farfarello’s regret/fear/confusion/panic/self-directed anger just about pulsed at Schuldig in bruise colors, mostly purple-black with tinges of sickly yellow, brown, and green. “When I went with my puisín to the cemetery to visit his family, I reacted... unusually. Badly. Unexpectedly.... I couldn’t help thinking of my parents, the people who lied to me and pretended to be my parents, and my sister, wondering where their corpses are now and if *anyone* knows or if they have a marker or if people visit them. I never found out; no one ever told me. My parents *lied* but not as badly or totally as Sister Ruth had, hadn’t *sinned* as she had sinned. I’d trusted her, and she’d betrayed me in ways most people couldn’t even dream of. She deserved to have been thrown, nameless, in a ditch somewhere or buried beneath a crossroads so people can run over her burial place endlessly.... My sister... although I suppose she wasn’t actually my sister by blood... deserved none of that. She was innocent. Horrible enough to slaughter her, but why did God have to use *my* hands?!
“Schuldig, I’m around corpses all the time and sometimes cemeteries, and I never react like this. What the Hell is going on?” He sounded close to hyperventilation. “Am I being attacked from outside? Perhaps God is demanding my attention like the whore He is....”
Sometimes a calm response could foster calm. “Perhaps you’re empathizing with Aya visiting his dead family.” Dead parents and a dead sister after all.
Farfarello’s expression turned contemptuous. “I think not. You answer my existential horror with that?”
“What, is it too obvious and easy for you?” Schuldig sneered. “You need a grander, more desperately reaching explanation?”
“You....”
“*You* came to *me*. Now take a seat and take a deep breath. What happened to you wasn’t an attack from outside.”
After a few minutes of angry and rebellious glaring, Farfarello pulled the chair back and sat in it. He nearly looked like the teen his age said he should be. It still shocked Schuldig what an obvious difference his healing powers had made to his appearance. Yeah, he’d done some work minimizing his scars, but his skin looked so much healthier too, with better circulation, far less pasty, and his silver hair gleamed. If you could strip his current emotional/mental upset away, Farfarello looked more like some kid who’d gotten into a *really* unfortunate accident. With Aya as his partner, Farfarello also acted a bit more like a regular guy. Farfarello *was* changing.
These days, sometimes they forgot the core of the person they were dealing with, and that could be dangerous. “Changing” didn’t mean “completely changed.”
While Schuldig loved breaking people’s minds for entertainment and spite, Farfarello had come to Schwarz already broken, with jagged shards thrusting out everywhere, which made toying with him less fun. Occasionally he’d even wondered what it would be like fixing him, if it were even possible, but that had always remained an idle fantasy since Farfarello’s damage made him a more valuable operative for Schwarz, someone whose mind hurt telepaths and madness drove precogs to the same. Crawford had used him like a weapon and put him in a locked box when he wasn’t needed.
Farfarello had more going for him these days than that, many more ways to be useful, but Schuldig didn’t know if Crawford would still want to try to repair him. Why rock the boat? For the most part Farfarello worked out as is. Saner might be not actually mean *better*. If sanity were even possible. Messing with him could lead to an unknown and unpredictable result as well as member downtime. If you cut the wrong wire, he could explode.
Also, it was always easier to break something than fix it as good as, or better than, new.
What Farfarello didn’t know but Schuldig did was that it had been Farfarello’s telepathic abilities turning on for the first time--showing him way too much unvarnished, unedited adult truth, secrets, and emotions--that had broken his mind and sent him on his first killing spree, not God, unless you said that God had made him telepathic and so set him up. While it would be a huge shift in worldview, perhaps one that Farfarello’s fragile sanity might not be able to handle, if Schuldig presented that God angle it might actually work. Since meeting Sister Ruth recently Farfarello had slowly come around to remembering that he’d had a (bloody) hand in the murder of his parents and sister, something he’d previously repressed and denied *hard* and blamed entirely on God’s evil intervention, with him as a victim as much as them. He’d apparently integrated that truth by saying that God had *used* him to do it, as if he’d been possessed. At least Farfarello had come to believe years ago that God hated psychics, something he saw from experience with his team members as obvious.
As much as Farfarello refused to consider it, this new breakthrough had to come from empathizing with Aya’s family issues. Brad wouldn’t like this new development.
Farfarello certainly didn’t. “Will I be suffocated by this useless regret forever?”
Then again, Aya had made a ton of positive changes to Farfarello too. “Aya seems to kill just fine.”
“I prefer to enjoy my job more than he does.”
Schuldig had to laugh. “Understandable. Give me a few minutes to confer with Brad about this.”
Looking alarmed, Farfarello asked, “Why does he have to be alerted to this? This is just a stupid emotional thing and won’t get in the way of my work, especially if you help me, which you will do because Crawford would bitch at you forever if you refused to do something that would help team dynamics.”
“Team dynamics is exactly why I have to talk to him first.”
“You have no qualms about keeping silent when it’s *your* private business that could affect team dynamics.”
“Are you trying to *blackmail* me, Farfarello?” If so, *huge* mistake.
Also, Nagi was listening in on the conversation in his bedroom and might react very strongly to the threat of Farfarello revealing his recent sexy playtime with Schuldig. Even if that might not be what Farfarello was currently talking about. Schuldig kept so many indiscretions to himself.
“No. It’d be stupid to get on the bad side of someone who might do work on my *brain*. I’m saying that you’ve kept quiet about your own doings, and *I’ve* also kept quiet about your doings. I want the same courtesy returned.”
“We can’t always get what we want.”
“You’re too glib by far.”
Schuldig could almost feel the tension vibrate in the air between them--Nagi would probably be able to see it--and could feel adrenaline singing through his body. This could get dangerous fast; in fact, it surprised him that it hadn’t already gotten there. Farfarello really had changed.
“I have an idea that might really help you, now and in the future,” Schuldig said, “but it’s a big shift, which is why I want to know what Brad thinks before I try it.” If Farfarello had changed so much, maybe an appeal to reason might work.
“I didn’t come to you for any ‘big shifts,’” Farfarello immediately answered as he backed away from the table and Schuldig. “Why the Hell would I need you to muck about with my personality or core beliefs over a brief episode like this, a one-time aberration? I was thinking of a bit of patchwork, something small and quick, and if that’s not what you’re offering I withdraw my request for aid. I’ll try my own kind of therapy: messing with my puisín and the slutkitten.” He grabbed his umbrella and ran out the door.
“Hmph,” Schuldig said to himself.
Nagi opened his bedroom door and said, “You handled that masterfully.”
“Oh, shut up. That was one battle in a war. Besides, I’m taking it as a victory that he didn’t rip anything or anyone to shreds here.” It was for the best anyway. He and Brad needed to have a talk and if he went ahead with it he wanted to have more planning behind it.
A precognitive vision about the success rate would be great too if he could get it.
******************************************************
Aya jumped when Kitten in the House’s alarms went off. Yoji shouted, “What the hell?” and they heard Ken yelling, “Yoji!”
Feeling something brushing across his senses, Aya turned to the window and asked Yoji, “Could that be triggering the alarms?”
Farfarello crouched on the window’s ledge outside, peering in, getting snowed on. It annoyed Aya to see him but gave him some relief as well, since he hadn’t been able to stop worrying about his partner and this kind of behavior was normal for Farfarello.
Yoji sighed. “Maybe, but our life sucks enough that we should check to make sure he’s not the only unauthorized visitor here. I’ll tell Ken to take somebody and check out the rest of the area.”
“Can Farfarello come in?” Aya would prefer it, but if he had to go outside to talk to Farfarello he would. He didn’t want to try it telepathically since just lightly touching Farfarello’s mind currently didn’t feel good at all.
“Through the window of my bedroom? Sure, that seems to be Schwarz’s favorite way of getting in here lately. Don’t give me that look, they’re *your* team. At least for now.”
Aya still didn’t know what to make of Yoji’s offer so he set it aside to think about it later. Besides, he didn’t want to take the chance of a more emotionally unstable than usual Farfarello reading it off him. Mayhem would definitely ensue, and it’d ensue in the heart of Weiß’s base of operations. In Yoji’s bedroom, no less.
Schuldig would make a perverted joke about that.
Yoji shook his head. “I’ll go downstairs to fill Ken in on what’s happening and get him to make sure there aren’t any more visitors. And turn that damned alarm off. You can let the little psycho inside, but try not to let him break anything or get too much snow on my stuff, okay? Or bleed or make you bleed on anything. I’ll be back.”
“I’m sorry, Yoji.” Farfarello had thoroughly inserted himself in their reunion, something neither Yoji nor Aya had wanted. Even when they’d been alone, Aya’s mind hadn’t been totally here.
“Eh. You never made anything easy, so why you should you start now?” Yoji said as he left the room, and Aya wished he could dispute that.
Aya unlocked and opened the window for Farfarello. Once he entered the room, Aya said, “Boots off,” and answered Farfarello’s growl with “They’re wet and dirty, and I won’t let you track that everywhere.”
“Fine.” Farfarello removed his boots.
“Are you finally willing to admit something’s wrong?”
“...aye. What’s that racket?”
“That’s the alarm you triggered while scaling the building.”
“I *wanted* you and the kittens to be aware of me. I wasn’t sneaking in.”
Aya had to ask, “Are you sure it’s not just that you’re used to Nagi tampering with security systems for you?”
“You’re hard on a man’s dignity. I stand by my story.”
“All right. Are you willing to talk to me now? You had me worried.”
“I admitted that something was wrong. I didn’t promise to discuss it at length.”
That brought Aya back to briefly thinking about Yoji’s odd offer before he restored mental discipline. “Why did you choose to show up now?”
“I stupidly went to the mindbreaker for help first, but his ‘help’ sounded somewhat like a personality transplant so I declined.”
It had to be serious if Farfarello went to Schuldig about it. “The snow on you is starting to melt, so let me get you a towel. I’ll be right back. You’re a guest here, so don’t damage anything while I’m away.” Figuring that making it brief gave Farfarello less time to be tempted, Aya returned with a towel in about two minutes, to find Farfarello kneeling by the bed and seemingly sniffing it. “What the hell are you doing--?” Then he got it. “We didn’t have sex, if that’s what you’re trying to find out. We just talked and had some tea.”
“In the slutkitten’s *bedroom*, surely the scene of many a crime.”
“You think I’m a liar?” Aya growled as he threw the folded towel at Farfarello’s head.
Farfarello used it to dry his hair. “I know that many people find him tempting.”
The blaring alarm gave Aya a headache, which made him even angrier than he would be usually. “Including you.”
“Including me *sometimes*. But I believe you that you didn’t give in to him. The bed doesn’t really give me a good idea because the slutkitten smells continually... excited.” As he walked over to Aya, coming close enough to breathe his breath, the alarm stopped, somehow emphasizing that moment. Farfarello grabbed him and kissed him hungrily, searchingly. In his surge of anger and sensation, Aya couldn’t decide whether he wanted to melt into the kiss or fight him off tooth and nail.
When he found a moment when he could break away to breathe, Aya gasped, “This is neither the right time nor place.”
“No such thing. Besides, it’d help me feel better, more like myself....”
"Glass Houses" part 276/?
By Viridian5
4/2003 - present
RATING: R. If m/m interaction bothers you, pass this by. AU.
SPOILERS: Glühen.
SUMMARY: After Aya's sister dies, Schwarz tries to save themselves and Aya from the mistakes of the Dramatic CDs and Glühen Schwarz tries to save him from himself--for their own reasons, of course--and neither they nor Weiß are ever the same again.
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: No, not yet. This is a trial run of a piece of an unfinished fic.
DISCLAIMERS: All things Weiß Kreuz belong to Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiß, Polygram k.k., and Animate Film. No infringement intended.
NOTES: Thanks to rosaleendhu and red_squared for audiencing, typo-watch, and encouragement. Thanks to 'nat for "puisín," which she says probably sounds like "pu-sheen." Inspirational music includes Covenant's United States of Mind, mayatawi's V Mix the Second CD (Jane Jensen, Kidneythieves, Poe's rock version of "Hello," Kristen Barry's "Ordinary Life," Lacuna Coil), Linkin Park's Meteora, A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step, Pigface's Easy Listening..., Shriekback's "The Bastard Sons of Enoch," Zeromancer's Eurotrash, and Neuroticfish's Les Chansons Neurotiques.
I am not responsible for any therapy bills incurred as a result of trauma from doing research on things mentioned in this story. If you look up, say, "butter dog porn" on your own, I refuse to take the blame. I've been told that it's a bad idea to eat soup or drink while reading "Glass Houses."
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"Glass Houses" part 276
By Viridian5
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Feeling surprisingly melancholy, Schuldig sat at the kitchen table of his new apartment and looked out the window at the heavy gray winter sky, wondering if it’d get any decent sunlight to bask in in months to come. He didn’t know how long they’d be living here, which didn’t usually bother him. From his teens on, the only place he’d steadily lived in for a long period of time was Rosenkreuz, and he’d very sensibly wanted to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. After that he’d done the nomadic thing with Brad and eventually the rest of Schwarz and adopted a be-in-the-moment attitude by necessity, letting Brad, who usually had more information from Eszett or his precognition than Schuldig had, do the planning ahead.
(He played long games with some people’s minds without Brad’s orders, but those had been for sport, hobbies, trivial. If they failed or ended too soon they annoyed him a bit but didn’t put him out for long. Besides, there were always other fish in the sea, and the sea was endless.)
But now he wasn’t content to be a leaf in the wind anymore. He *wanted* to plan ahead and have some expectation of where he’d be in, say, six months. He... wanted to do something that *mattered*, that lasted.
He had no idea where the hell any of this had come from.
His most recent big plan hadn’t succeeded. He’d so wanted Schwarz to enjoy their time off and see the rejuvenating power of a good vacation to get them to go on them more often. Despite all the traveling he’d done in his life, he still had so many places he wanted to see and be in. Some locations he’d gone on a job didn’t count from the proscribed route of places there his work had limited him to.
Unfortunately, Schwarz had fallen apart without jobs to stop them from thinking and tell them what to do and needed a kind of vacation from their vacation. They’d even ruined *Schuldig’s* vacation by forcing him to work. Everything had been such a disaster he doubted they’d try it again for a very long time, if ever.
If Schuldig did get the private vacation Brad had promised, he’d be appreciative (and somewhat surprised). It wouldn’t be the same, though, not without his peeps, his gang, his in-house entertainment.
In almost every way, their Jamaica trip felt like a defeat. None of them came back rested or rejuvenated, and Schuldig knew he wasn’t alone in feeling jet-lagged and no longer adjusted to winter and its cold.
Ironically, Schuldig himself currently had too much time to think. Moving in hadn’t taken long because they didn’t actually have much to move. They all had possessions scattered across Asia, Europe, and parts of North America, jettisoned when they became inconvenient, and bought what they needed when they needed it. Schwarz had to travel light.
Both Brad and Schuldig had found Brad’s call to Persia disappointing and anticlimactic too, having looked forward to bullying Persia into doing what they wanted, fighting for a win, with Brad saying with a Crawford smile that he loved to play the villain to support his team. But Persia had given in on paying for Nagi’s efforts immediately, claiming he had no idea the e-mail account had exploded like that. Of course he wouldn’t take advantage of Prodigy. Schuldig had been tempted to mindread Persia to see if all that was bullshit, but Persia had Katsura on duty protecting his mind and Schuldig didn’t feel like taking the time and effort of discreetly breaking in just to satisfy his curiosity on something so small. The phone call took just a few minutes, and Nagi’s new work agreement came through by e-mail soon after that. Disappointing, though it pleased Nagi to face so little friction.
After that Nagi went to his new bedroom to work on his computer alone, while Brad left to return their old apartment’s keys to the landlord, which shouldn’t take long. It left Schuldig at loose ends. He didn’t have enough time to really get into anything, just enough to get bored and melancholy.
Maybe having some of the kids move out into their own place, even if it *was* right next door, even though Nagi would still live with him and Brad, had something to do with his weird mood. Maybe, but Schuldig didn’t really see himself as suffering from empty nest syndrome, even if it might be fun to joke with Brad about how they didn’t even have a kids’ room they could convert into a rec room or walk-in closet. But things *were* changing....
Self-analysis *sucked*, but every telepath had to do it periodically to figure out where their ideas and drives came from.
A sudden blast of regret/fear/confusion/panic/self-directed anger jolted Schuldig, and it had Farfarello’s unique mental flavor to it, even if Farfarello seldom felt some of those emotions. What the hell had happened? Schuldig reached out and found Snow-white and Rose-red at a local cemetery. Something there had unexpectedly set Farfarello off but Schuldig couldn’t pick up fine details under the deluge of feelings and Farfarello’s desperate attempts to repress and deny. Plus, reading Farfarello at the moment felt like sticking his hand in an operating garbage disposal, all darkness, stench, and sharp slicing and grinding blades. Schuldig backed off and waited to see what happened.
Farfarello couldn’t repress successfully and put up a front Aya saw right through then argued and bullied Aya into going to see Yoji. Topsy-turvy day indeed. Even more worrying, Farfarello didn’t follow Aya to Kitten in the House to skulk about outside stalking them or find a way to get inside and put himself between them, which would be his usual two choices. Instead, Farfarello was rushing back to the apartments intending to get Schuldig to fix whatever had gone wrong.
Shit. Maybe no longer getting a room they could lock from the outside had been premature. It probably wouldn’t get to that point, but it’d sure make Schuldig feel better if he knew he had the option of throwing Farfarello into a secured room.
Farfarello better not make a mess. They’d just gotten this apartment.
Schuldig hid his gun under the newspaper on the table, in reach, and a knife up each sleeve. ~ Nagi, Farfarello is coming back in a major lather. Don’t come out of your room, draw attention to yourself, or restrain him when he gets here but be ready to intervene if things sound like they’re going bad or I call for you. He’s dissociated from his body, so make sure your mental shields are strong since he’s acting more and more like a telepath these days. ~
~ Do you expect things to go bad? ~ Nagi asked.
~ He’s unpredictable at his best, and right now he’s in a lot of emotional tumult and unsure how to deal with it. He’s coming to me for help but if he’s not happy with how that’s going.... Better for us to be safe than sorry. ~
~ Understood. ~
As he waited for Farfarello to get back and explode all over everything, Schuldig found himself wishing that Brad would return already. Why should he have to face this kind of problem by himself?
If things went to hell too quickly, Schuldig would act on his own initiative and make his own decisions on dealing with Farfarello, and they might not be what Crawford would prefer. If Crawford didn’t like the consequences, he should have foreseen this and been here to intervene.
The keys turned loudly in the lock, then Farfarello opened the door in a rush and slammed it shut. He tossed his black umbrella to the side, obviously not caring where it landed, and strode forward until he stopped at the end of the table opposite from Schuldig, his single tawny eye blazing with emotion, his gloved hands clenching on the back of a chair. He radiated crisp winter cold. “Schuldig,” he said, his voice deep, dark, and almost agonized.
“You just used my actual name. Have things gotten this bad?” Schuldig didn’t let his surprise or anxiety show in his face or surface thoughts.
“I’m not here for you to break my mind. The opposite.” But instead of saying anything more he just breathed hard.
“The suspense is killing me. What is this about? I expected you to be interfering with Aya’s reunion with Yoji.”
“I would far prefer that myself.” Farfarello’s regret/fear/confusion/panic/self-directed anger just about pulsed at Schuldig in bruise colors, mostly purple-black with tinges of sickly yellow, brown, and green. “When I went with my puisín to the cemetery to visit his family, I reacted... unusually. Badly. Unexpectedly.... I couldn’t help thinking of my parents, the people who lied to me and pretended to be my parents, and my sister, wondering where their corpses are now and if *anyone* knows or if they have a marker or if people visit them. I never found out; no one ever told me. My parents *lied* but not as badly or totally as Sister Ruth had, hadn’t *sinned* as she had sinned. I’d trusted her, and she’d betrayed me in ways most people couldn’t even dream of. She deserved to have been thrown, nameless, in a ditch somewhere or buried beneath a crossroads so people can run over her burial place endlessly.... My sister... although I suppose she wasn’t actually my sister by blood... deserved none of that. She was innocent. Horrible enough to slaughter her, but why did God have to use *my* hands?!
“Schuldig, I’m around corpses all the time and sometimes cemeteries, and I never react like this. What the Hell is going on?” He sounded close to hyperventilation. “Am I being attacked from outside? Perhaps God is demanding my attention like the whore He is....”
Sometimes a calm response could foster calm. “Perhaps you’re empathizing with Aya visiting his dead family.” Dead parents and a dead sister after all.
Farfarello’s expression turned contemptuous. “I think not. You answer my existential horror with that?”
“What, is it too obvious and easy for you?” Schuldig sneered. “You need a grander, more desperately reaching explanation?”
“You....”
“*You* came to *me*. Now take a seat and take a deep breath. What happened to you wasn’t an attack from outside.”
After a few minutes of angry and rebellious glaring, Farfarello pulled the chair back and sat in it. He nearly looked like the teen his age said he should be. It still shocked Schuldig what an obvious difference his healing powers had made to his appearance. Yeah, he’d done some work minimizing his scars, but his skin looked so much healthier too, with better circulation, far less pasty, and his silver hair gleamed. If you could strip his current emotional/mental upset away, Farfarello looked more like some kid who’d gotten into a *really* unfortunate accident. With Aya as his partner, Farfarello also acted a bit more like a regular guy. Farfarello *was* changing.
These days, sometimes they forgot the core of the person they were dealing with, and that could be dangerous. “Changing” didn’t mean “completely changed.”
While Schuldig loved breaking people’s minds for entertainment and spite, Farfarello had come to Schwarz already broken, with jagged shards thrusting out everywhere, which made toying with him less fun. Occasionally he’d even wondered what it would be like fixing him, if it were even possible, but that had always remained an idle fantasy since Farfarello’s damage made him a more valuable operative for Schwarz, someone whose mind hurt telepaths and madness drove precogs to the same. Crawford had used him like a weapon and put him in a locked box when he wasn’t needed.
Farfarello had more going for him these days than that, many more ways to be useful, but Schuldig didn’t know if Crawford would still want to try to repair him. Why rock the boat? For the most part Farfarello worked out as is. Saner might be not actually mean *better*. If sanity were even possible. Messing with him could lead to an unknown and unpredictable result as well as member downtime. If you cut the wrong wire, he could explode.
Also, it was always easier to break something than fix it as good as, or better than, new.
What Farfarello didn’t know but Schuldig did was that it had been Farfarello’s telepathic abilities turning on for the first time--showing him way too much unvarnished, unedited adult truth, secrets, and emotions--that had broken his mind and sent him on his first killing spree, not God, unless you said that God had made him telepathic and so set him up. While it would be a huge shift in worldview, perhaps one that Farfarello’s fragile sanity might not be able to handle, if Schuldig presented that God angle it might actually work. Since meeting Sister Ruth recently Farfarello had slowly come around to remembering that he’d had a (bloody) hand in the murder of his parents and sister, something he’d previously repressed and denied *hard* and blamed entirely on God’s evil intervention, with him as a victim as much as them. He’d apparently integrated that truth by saying that God had *used* him to do it, as if he’d been possessed. At least Farfarello had come to believe years ago that God hated psychics, something he saw from experience with his team members as obvious.
As much as Farfarello refused to consider it, this new breakthrough had to come from empathizing with Aya’s family issues. Brad wouldn’t like this new development.
Farfarello certainly didn’t. “Will I be suffocated by this useless regret forever?”
Then again, Aya had made a ton of positive changes to Farfarello too. “Aya seems to kill just fine.”
“I prefer to enjoy my job more than he does.”
Schuldig had to laugh. “Understandable. Give me a few minutes to confer with Brad about this.”
Looking alarmed, Farfarello asked, “Why does he have to be alerted to this? This is just a stupid emotional thing and won’t get in the way of my work, especially if you help me, which you will do because Crawford would bitch at you forever if you refused to do something that would help team dynamics.”
“Team dynamics is exactly why I have to talk to him first.”
“You have no qualms about keeping silent when it’s *your* private business that could affect team dynamics.”
“Are you trying to *blackmail* me, Farfarello?” If so, *huge* mistake.
Also, Nagi was listening in on the conversation in his bedroom and might react very strongly to the threat of Farfarello revealing his recent sexy playtime with Schuldig. Even if that might not be what Farfarello was currently talking about. Schuldig kept so many indiscretions to himself.
“No. It’d be stupid to get on the bad side of someone who might do work on my *brain*. I’m saying that you’ve kept quiet about your own doings, and *I’ve* also kept quiet about your doings. I want the same courtesy returned.”
“We can’t always get what we want.”
“You’re too glib by far.”
Schuldig could almost feel the tension vibrate in the air between them--Nagi would probably be able to see it--and could feel adrenaline singing through his body. This could get dangerous fast; in fact, it surprised him that it hadn’t already gotten there. Farfarello really had changed.
“I have an idea that might really help you, now and in the future,” Schuldig said, “but it’s a big shift, which is why I want to know what Brad thinks before I try it.” If Farfarello had changed so much, maybe an appeal to reason might work.
“I didn’t come to you for any ‘big shifts,’” Farfarello immediately answered as he backed away from the table and Schuldig. “Why the Hell would I need you to muck about with my personality or core beliefs over a brief episode like this, a one-time aberration? I was thinking of a bit of patchwork, something small and quick, and if that’s not what you’re offering I withdraw my request for aid. I’ll try my own kind of therapy: messing with my puisín and the slutkitten.” He grabbed his umbrella and ran out the door.
“Hmph,” Schuldig said to himself.
Nagi opened his bedroom door and said, “You handled that masterfully.”
“Oh, shut up. That was one battle in a war. Besides, I’m taking it as a victory that he didn’t rip anything or anyone to shreds here.” It was for the best anyway. He and Brad needed to have a talk and if he went ahead with it he wanted to have more planning behind it.
A precognitive vision about the success rate would be great too if he could get it.
******************************************************
Aya jumped when Kitten in the House’s alarms went off. Yoji shouted, “What the hell?” and they heard Ken yelling, “Yoji!”
Feeling something brushing across his senses, Aya turned to the window and asked Yoji, “Could that be triggering the alarms?”
Farfarello crouched on the window’s ledge outside, peering in, getting snowed on. It annoyed Aya to see him but gave him some relief as well, since he hadn’t been able to stop worrying about his partner and this kind of behavior was normal for Farfarello.
Yoji sighed. “Maybe, but our life sucks enough that we should check to make sure he’s not the only unauthorized visitor here. I’ll tell Ken to take somebody and check out the rest of the area.”
“Can Farfarello come in?” Aya would prefer it, but if he had to go outside to talk to Farfarello he would. He didn’t want to try it telepathically since just lightly touching Farfarello’s mind currently didn’t feel good at all.
“Through the window of my bedroom? Sure, that seems to be Schwarz’s favorite way of getting in here lately. Don’t give me that look, they’re *your* team. At least for now.”
Aya still didn’t know what to make of Yoji’s offer so he set it aside to think about it later. Besides, he didn’t want to take the chance of a more emotionally unstable than usual Farfarello reading it off him. Mayhem would definitely ensue, and it’d ensue in the heart of Weiß’s base of operations. In Yoji’s bedroom, no less.
Schuldig would make a perverted joke about that.
Yoji shook his head. “I’ll go downstairs to fill Ken in on what’s happening and get him to make sure there aren’t any more visitors. And turn that damned alarm off. You can let the little psycho inside, but try not to let him break anything or get too much snow on my stuff, okay? Or bleed or make you bleed on anything. I’ll be back.”
“I’m sorry, Yoji.” Farfarello had thoroughly inserted himself in their reunion, something neither Yoji nor Aya had wanted. Even when they’d been alone, Aya’s mind hadn’t been totally here.
“Eh. You never made anything easy, so why you should you start now?” Yoji said as he left the room, and Aya wished he could dispute that.
Aya unlocked and opened the window for Farfarello. Once he entered the room, Aya said, “Boots off,” and answered Farfarello’s growl with “They’re wet and dirty, and I won’t let you track that everywhere.”
“Fine.” Farfarello removed his boots.
“Are you finally willing to admit something’s wrong?”
“...aye. What’s that racket?”
“That’s the alarm you triggered while scaling the building.”
“I *wanted* you and the kittens to be aware of me. I wasn’t sneaking in.”
Aya had to ask, “Are you sure it’s not just that you’re used to Nagi tampering with security systems for you?”
“You’re hard on a man’s dignity. I stand by my story.”
“All right. Are you willing to talk to me now? You had me worried.”
“I admitted that something was wrong. I didn’t promise to discuss it at length.”
That brought Aya back to briefly thinking about Yoji’s odd offer before he restored mental discipline. “Why did you choose to show up now?”
“I stupidly went to the mindbreaker for help first, but his ‘help’ sounded somewhat like a personality transplant so I declined.”
It had to be serious if Farfarello went to Schuldig about it. “The snow on you is starting to melt, so let me get you a towel. I’ll be right back. You’re a guest here, so don’t damage anything while I’m away.” Figuring that making it brief gave Farfarello less time to be tempted, Aya returned with a towel in about two minutes, to find Farfarello kneeling by the bed and seemingly sniffing it. “What the hell are you doing--?” Then he got it. “We didn’t have sex, if that’s what you’re trying to find out. We just talked and had some tea.”
“In the slutkitten’s *bedroom*, surely the scene of many a crime.”
“You think I’m a liar?” Aya growled as he threw the folded towel at Farfarello’s head.
Farfarello used it to dry his hair. “I know that many people find him tempting.”
The blaring alarm gave Aya a headache, which made him even angrier than he would be usually. “Including you.”
“Including me *sometimes*. But I believe you that you didn’t give in to him. The bed doesn’t really give me a good idea because the slutkitten smells continually... excited.” As he walked over to Aya, coming close enough to breathe his breath, the alarm stopped, somehow emphasizing that moment. Farfarello grabbed him and kissed him hungrily, searchingly. In his surge of anger and sensation, Aya couldn’t decide whether he wanted to melt into the kiss or fight him off tooth and nail.
When he found a moment when he could break away to breathe, Aya gasped, “This is neither the right time nor place.”
“No such thing. Besides, it’d help me feel better, more like myself....”