"Once and Again" WIP
Yami no Matsuei/Weiß Kreuz AU crossover fic, one section of which appeared in a slightly different form in my own “Waiting Room”:
===================
“Over and Again”
By Viridian5
===================
*Three years ago*
White stained with red blood and red moonlight, the body beneath him whimpered softly. Sated, Muraki smiled. The boy had been more entertaining than he’d expected, since the child’s empathy had added an extra tang of sadomasochism to his suffering.
Now for the final touch. He stripped the boy’s memory of this night away. This body would take three years to die, as if from a wasting sickness, and no one would ever guess the cause. The beings he called upon appreciated such offerings of torment.
Muraki cleaned the boy up, dressed him and himself, and put his victim quietly to bed. When he left the house, he left no trace of himself.
******************************************************
*Now*
“Abyssinian, get out of there!” Omi hissed into the headset. Sugito’s thugs were proving to be far more skilled and dangerous than the dossier had suggested.
He heard Aya growl and saw his glare through the camera of the security system he’d hacked into. When Weiß left, Omi would screw up all the footage. Aya finished setting up the charge, then stood.
Movement....
Suddenly, Aya’s head rocked, then he fell and hit the floor, out of camera range. What had happened? “Ay-- Abyssinian! Abyssinian, what’s going on?” But Omi knew. He did. Even if it couldn’t be.
Aya didn’t answer. Because he couldn’t, Omi knew.
Yoji ran into range and whispered, “Oh fuck,” into his headset. He picked up... Aya’s body. Omi could see the head now, and there was no way anyone could survive with that much of his skull blown out.
Eyes stinging, Omi gasped for air. Aya had only been with them for a year, and they knew almost nothing about him by his choice, but Omi had liked him and seen that he was hurting. Something had been driving him.... Omi had tried to reach him and failed.
It was far too late now.
“Bring him home,” Omi said softly to Yoji.
******************************************************
After years of torment, Hisoka felt himself fading, dying, at last, and even though it made him so angry, it was a relief too. Over at last. No more pain, no more disease, no more fumbling doctors who didn’t have a fucking clue what was wrong with him but pretended they did even as they experimented on him.
He just wished he knew what had killed him.
Then he was gone.
******************************************************
Where had she gone? She’d given him the slip somehow.
Tsuzuki suddenly felt something hard press into his back. A gun barrel. He put his hands up. “There’s no need for that,” he said softly, gently.
A deep voice answered, “This is completely necessary, vampire.”
Vampire? Wait--
Gushoshin swooped down, arms waving. “No! Fujimiya-san, this is your partner!”
Surprised, Tsuzuki turned to face a sullen and equally surprised young man... kid, actually. “Partner?” they both asked, though the kid had some outrage in his voice.
******************************************************
“Now, cheers to the meeting of the pair! Cheers!” Gushoshin shouted as he lifted a glass high, while Tsuzuki tried not to look across the table at the cold-eyed kid who would be his new partner. The cold-eyed kid who’d stuck a gun in Tsuzuki’s back and carried a katana under his long coat that he probably would have used instead if it wouldn’t have attracted too much attention in such a public place.
Tsuzuki’s glances at that kid showed him trying not to look back either. Violet eyes on him. Tsuzuki wondered if that meant anything and if those violet eyes had ever gotten this kid in trouble as his purple ones had gotten him into such troubles.
This kid. Kids could be cruel. Tsuzuki knew.
The chief wanted this to be his new partner?
“Tsuzuki-san, smile, smile!” Gushoshin growled, then put on a big smile. At least as much of a smile as can be shown by a beak.
Tsuzuki put on a big friendly smile. “Hello, I’m the one who takes care of the Kyuushuu area, Tsuzuki.”
“Fujimiya Aya,” the boy answered, short and rude. Fujimiya Aya looked bored, annoyed, and faintly psychotic. It made Tsuzuki twitch.
Sensing awkwardness, not that it took much effort, Gushoshin tried to smooth the rough spot over by saying that Aya had been chosen by the chief himself, flattering the sullen little--
Tsuzuki would be friendly. Maybe Aya just didn’t make good first impressions. Accusing one’s new partner of being a vampire and preparing to shoot him might be a truly terrible first impression, but he had to give Aya a chance. Aya would probably dump him
the way everyone else did, but....
“By the way, how old are you?” Tsuzuki asked.
“19.”
Older than he’d thought but.... “You died at a young age. Was it a car accident?”
Aya *flinched*, and his cold, annoyed expression cracked to reveal torment. Tsuzuki wanted to reach out....
“Tsuzuki-san!” Gushoshin shouted.
The chill, sullen look returned to Aya’s face. “I messed up on a job of mine and died of it.”
At 19? “What kind of job can kill you for a mistake?” Tsuzuki asked.
“The kind where you try to kill people who have bodyguards around to discourage it.”
Tsuzuki nearly choked. His new partner was an assassin? What kind of cases did the chief think he’d get that he’d be assigned a professional killer? It felt like a rebuke.
A 19-year-old assassin, dead and a Shinigami now. So young. There was something feral and abandoned and hungry about Aya. What kind of tragic life had led him here? No wonder he was a cold, defensive jerk. Tsuzuki decided to try harder.
Aya leaned forward a little, an almost predatory expression on his face. “Since we’re asking personal questions, it’s your turn to answer mine. You’re the number one career man at the Enma Department, right? Why is an elite like that a Shinigami?”
“Elite? Me?” Why did Tsuzuki get the feeling that this would blow up in his face? And this one wasn’t even his fault!
Gushoshin almost exploded with laughter. “Tsuzuki? He’s the laziest waste of space in the Enma Department!”
It didn’t hurt. It really didn’t hurt. People didn’t understand why he tried to stay out of things....
From the look on Aya’s face, he could have been dying all over again. “What? The chief said--”
“I’m sorry that you don’t know anything,” Gushoshin said.
“What?”
“The rule is for Shinigami to travel in pairs. But nobody wants to pair up with Tsuzuki.”
It didn’t hurt. They must have had good reasons.
Aya stood in a rush. “He *lied* to me? They have to know why I agreed to-- I can’t be paired with someone useless!”
Not good. Not quite the reaction Tsuzuki had expected from Aya, though. How did Aya’s partner have to be useful? Trying to defuse the situation, Tsuzuki kept eating and said, “This is good.”
Aya looked very far from defused. He leaned forward so fast that his one long earring swung. “Stop eating, and listen to me!” Aya stilled when Tsuzuki reached out and ate his dumpling. “You--”
“You weren’t eating it.” A food duel would be just the thing to loosen Aya up. But instead of battling for the last bits of food, Aya’s chopsticks went straight for Tsuzuki’s hand, poking and smacking at the most painful points, vicious. “Hey!”
Aya’s violet eyes burned coldly. “I am not a child, Tsuzuki. Don’t treat me like one. Good night.” He left the table, stalking away. No sense of humor at all.
This would no doubt be the shortest partnership Tsuzuki had ever had, and that would be saying something. It would be better this way. Who could work with such an unpleasant person?
“You screwed that one up,” Gushoshin said.
“*I* screwed it up? The chief told him I was an elite. How could I possibly have salvaged that?”
******************************************************
Aya sat on his bed in the cheap hotel room and tried to calm himself. They had lied to him about his partner. Might they also have lied about the care his sister would get? They couldn’t have. Could they? She needed to be provided for....
What could he possibly do if they had lied? He was dead, yet he still walked the earth when they let him. If he protested, they could just let him go on to whatever hell his actions as an assassin had earned him, and his sister would still have no protectors left.
He wouldn’t have this trouble if he hadn’t gotten himself killed so stupidly.
“He treats me like a child sometimes. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since he is over 90 years old.” Aya stilled as he heard footsteps outside the closed door, then relaxed a little as they continued moving down the hall. The hospital gave him the privacy he asked for, but he still wondered if they talked about him and Aya, even if they *didn’t* know that Fujimiya Aya’s older brother was dead but still visiting as a Shinigami.
The Enma Department may have lied to him to get him to pair with Tsuzuki, but they’d kept to their word where it regarded Aya’s care. He served them in exchange for this, relieved that he could still provide for her even now.
“You’d like Tsuzuki.” He always told her that, but the thought comforted him so he repeated it. She would like his partner. “He’s like a big puppy, and he’s very kind. And he cares about people too much.... You’d feed him desserts.”
He used to talk to her about his missions while he’d been with Crashers and Weiß, yet he couldn’t bring himself to discuss his current job with her, not with all the dealings he had with monsters like demons and Dr. Muraki. Unable to know how much awareness she had within her coma, he refused to give her material for possible nightmares. Thus, he mostly talked about himself and Tsuzuki. If she were conscious she’d laugh at him so hard....
He’d like that. She could laugh at silly Ran and his weird feelings for his partner and his prickly shyness as much as she wanted to. He gently let go of her warm, limp hand, wrapped her earring in her fist, and kissed her cheek. “I have to go, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
As he opened the door, he heard something drag. Someone had left a doll in the hallway in front of it.
******************************************************
Tsuzuki heard Aya shout, “--I won’t!” Tsuzuki closed the door behind him.
“There’s a big stir at the hospital,” Tatsumi said. “They’ve noticed she’s gone.”
“I don’t care!”
“You have to be reasonable.”
“No, I don’t. Not about this.” Aya’s eyes were wide and wild. His habitual cold anger had turned hot and featured a large helping of terror in it.
“We can’t keep her here.”
“We let Hijiri--”
“That was different. Temporary. It was an emergency.”
“This isn’t?”
“This is no place for the living.”
Aya pointed to the couch. “You call that living?”
Tsuzuki hadn’t noticed the girl lying there until then. She was young, pretty, and very still. He wondered about the hospital gown. What had Aya been up to?
Watari held and examined a porcelain doll of the kind Muraki favored. Like the girl on the couch, it had its hair in two braids and wore a simple hospital gown, but its hair and eye colors matched Aya’s, red and violet. The eyes “closed” when you moved the doll. When Watari swept its braids away from its ears, Tsuzuki saw that the ears had been pierced but held no earrings.
Tsuzuki started to understand.
“You know what Muraki does to people, especially young girls,” Aya continued. “I would rather kill her myself.” His choked voice and manner suggested that he would turn his sword on himself after that. “Please, sir. Please.”
“We can move her.”
“He can find her!” Then Aya finally noticed Tsuzuki in the room and visibly tried and failed to compose himself. He *vibrated*. “Please leave, Tsuzuki.” It failed to sound as imperious as it would have usually.
Aya didn’t want him to see him like this. Tsuzuki wanted to touch him but didn’t know whether a touch would calm or incite at this point.
“No, he should be here for this,” the chief said. “Tsuzuki, I would like to introduce you to Fujimiya Aya. She’s the focus of our discussion.”
“Then who would you be?” Tsuzuki asked Aya softly.
His eyes blazed. “I’m Aya.”
“And always have been?”
He looked down and away. “No. No, I was Ran. I’m her brother.” Was this what Aya had become a Shinigami for, the thing that made it impossible for him to find peace? Frightening, amazing, how Muraki could embody so many threats and messages in one doll. “I--” Aya put his hand over his eyes.
This was part of Muraki’s plan too, not just to terrify but also to force these confessions, knowing full well how much it would hurt Aya to give them. “Aya,” Tsuzuki said, “I’ll help you protect her. I swear--”
Aya actually looked more disturbed. “Don’t. That’s what he wants. Can’t you see that? Don’t promise that!”
“Why?”
“Then he’d be able to break us both if he ravaged her.”
===================
“Over and Again”
By Viridian5
===================
*Three years ago*
White stained with red blood and red moonlight, the body beneath him whimpered softly. Sated, Muraki smiled. The boy had been more entertaining than he’d expected, since the child’s empathy had added an extra tang of sadomasochism to his suffering.
Now for the final touch. He stripped the boy’s memory of this night away. This body would take three years to die, as if from a wasting sickness, and no one would ever guess the cause. The beings he called upon appreciated such offerings of torment.
Muraki cleaned the boy up, dressed him and himself, and put his victim quietly to bed. When he left the house, he left no trace of himself.
******************************************************
*Now*
“Abyssinian, get out of there!” Omi hissed into the headset. Sugito’s thugs were proving to be far more skilled and dangerous than the dossier had suggested.
He heard Aya growl and saw his glare through the camera of the security system he’d hacked into. When Weiß left, Omi would screw up all the footage. Aya finished setting up the charge, then stood.
Movement....
Suddenly, Aya’s head rocked, then he fell and hit the floor, out of camera range. What had happened? “Ay-- Abyssinian! Abyssinian, what’s going on?” But Omi knew. He did. Even if it couldn’t be.
Aya didn’t answer. Because he couldn’t, Omi knew.
Yoji ran into range and whispered, “Oh fuck,” into his headset. He picked up... Aya’s body. Omi could see the head now, and there was no way anyone could survive with that much of his skull blown out.
Eyes stinging, Omi gasped for air. Aya had only been with them for a year, and they knew almost nothing about him by his choice, but Omi had liked him and seen that he was hurting. Something had been driving him.... Omi had tried to reach him and failed.
It was far too late now.
“Bring him home,” Omi said softly to Yoji.
******************************************************
After years of torment, Hisoka felt himself fading, dying, at last, and even though it made him so angry, it was a relief too. Over at last. No more pain, no more disease, no more fumbling doctors who didn’t have a fucking clue what was wrong with him but pretended they did even as they experimented on him.
He just wished he knew what had killed him.
Then he was gone.
******************************************************
Where had she gone? She’d given him the slip somehow.
Tsuzuki suddenly felt something hard press into his back. A gun barrel. He put his hands up. “There’s no need for that,” he said softly, gently.
A deep voice answered, “This is completely necessary, vampire.”
Vampire? Wait--
Gushoshin swooped down, arms waving. “No! Fujimiya-san, this is your partner!”
Surprised, Tsuzuki turned to face a sullen and equally surprised young man... kid, actually. “Partner?” they both asked, though the kid had some outrage in his voice.
******************************************************
“Now, cheers to the meeting of the pair! Cheers!” Gushoshin shouted as he lifted a glass high, while Tsuzuki tried not to look across the table at the cold-eyed kid who would be his new partner. The cold-eyed kid who’d stuck a gun in Tsuzuki’s back and carried a katana under his long coat that he probably would have used instead if it wouldn’t have attracted too much attention in such a public place.
Tsuzuki’s glances at that kid showed him trying not to look back either. Violet eyes on him. Tsuzuki wondered if that meant anything and if those violet eyes had ever gotten this kid in trouble as his purple ones had gotten him into such troubles.
This kid. Kids could be cruel. Tsuzuki knew.
The chief wanted this to be his new partner?
“Tsuzuki-san, smile, smile!” Gushoshin growled, then put on a big smile. At least as much of a smile as can be shown by a beak.
Tsuzuki put on a big friendly smile. “Hello, I’m the one who takes care of the Kyuushuu area, Tsuzuki.”
“Fujimiya Aya,” the boy answered, short and rude. Fujimiya Aya looked bored, annoyed, and faintly psychotic. It made Tsuzuki twitch.
Sensing awkwardness, not that it took much effort, Gushoshin tried to smooth the rough spot over by saying that Aya had been chosen by the chief himself, flattering the sullen little--
Tsuzuki would be friendly. Maybe Aya just didn’t make good first impressions. Accusing one’s new partner of being a vampire and preparing to shoot him might be a truly terrible first impression, but he had to give Aya a chance. Aya would probably dump him
the way everyone else did, but....
“By the way, how old are you?” Tsuzuki asked.
“19.”
Older than he’d thought but.... “You died at a young age. Was it a car accident?”
Aya *flinched*, and his cold, annoyed expression cracked to reveal torment. Tsuzuki wanted to reach out....
“Tsuzuki-san!” Gushoshin shouted.
The chill, sullen look returned to Aya’s face. “I messed up on a job of mine and died of it.”
At 19? “What kind of job can kill you for a mistake?” Tsuzuki asked.
“The kind where you try to kill people who have bodyguards around to discourage it.”
Tsuzuki nearly choked. His new partner was an assassin? What kind of cases did the chief think he’d get that he’d be assigned a professional killer? It felt like a rebuke.
A 19-year-old assassin, dead and a Shinigami now. So young. There was something feral and abandoned and hungry about Aya. What kind of tragic life had led him here? No wonder he was a cold, defensive jerk. Tsuzuki decided to try harder.
Aya leaned forward a little, an almost predatory expression on his face. “Since we’re asking personal questions, it’s your turn to answer mine. You’re the number one career man at the Enma Department, right? Why is an elite like that a Shinigami?”
“Elite? Me?” Why did Tsuzuki get the feeling that this would blow up in his face? And this one wasn’t even his fault!
Gushoshin almost exploded with laughter. “Tsuzuki? He’s the laziest waste of space in the Enma Department!”
It didn’t hurt. It really didn’t hurt. People didn’t understand why he tried to stay out of things....
From the look on Aya’s face, he could have been dying all over again. “What? The chief said--”
“I’m sorry that you don’t know anything,” Gushoshin said.
“What?”
“The rule is for Shinigami to travel in pairs. But nobody wants to pair up with Tsuzuki.”
It didn’t hurt. They must have had good reasons.
Aya stood in a rush. “He *lied* to me? They have to know why I agreed to-- I can’t be paired with someone useless!”
Not good. Not quite the reaction Tsuzuki had expected from Aya, though. How did Aya’s partner have to be useful? Trying to defuse the situation, Tsuzuki kept eating and said, “This is good.”
Aya looked very far from defused. He leaned forward so fast that his one long earring swung. “Stop eating, and listen to me!” Aya stilled when Tsuzuki reached out and ate his dumpling. “You--”
“You weren’t eating it.” A food duel would be just the thing to loosen Aya up. But instead of battling for the last bits of food, Aya’s chopsticks went straight for Tsuzuki’s hand, poking and smacking at the most painful points, vicious. “Hey!”
Aya’s violet eyes burned coldly. “I am not a child, Tsuzuki. Don’t treat me like one. Good night.” He left the table, stalking away. No sense of humor at all.
This would no doubt be the shortest partnership Tsuzuki had ever had, and that would be saying something. It would be better this way. Who could work with such an unpleasant person?
“You screwed that one up,” Gushoshin said.
“*I* screwed it up? The chief told him I was an elite. How could I possibly have salvaged that?”
******************************************************
Aya sat on his bed in the cheap hotel room and tried to calm himself. They had lied to him about his partner. Might they also have lied about the care his sister would get? They couldn’t have. Could they? She needed to be provided for....
What could he possibly do if they had lied? He was dead, yet he still walked the earth when they let him. If he protested, they could just let him go on to whatever hell his actions as an assassin had earned him, and his sister would still have no protectors left.
He wouldn’t have this trouble if he hadn’t gotten himself killed so stupidly.
“He treats me like a child sometimes. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since he is over 90 years old.” Aya stilled as he heard footsteps outside the closed door, then relaxed a little as they continued moving down the hall. The hospital gave him the privacy he asked for, but he still wondered if they talked about him and Aya, even if they *didn’t* know that Fujimiya Aya’s older brother was dead but still visiting as a Shinigami.
The Enma Department may have lied to him to get him to pair with Tsuzuki, but they’d kept to their word where it regarded Aya’s care. He served them in exchange for this, relieved that he could still provide for her even now.
“You’d like Tsuzuki.” He always told her that, but the thought comforted him so he repeated it. She would like his partner. “He’s like a big puppy, and he’s very kind. And he cares about people too much.... You’d feed him desserts.”
He used to talk to her about his missions while he’d been with Crashers and Weiß, yet he couldn’t bring himself to discuss his current job with her, not with all the dealings he had with monsters like demons and Dr. Muraki. Unable to know how much awareness she had within her coma, he refused to give her material for possible nightmares. Thus, he mostly talked about himself and Tsuzuki. If she were conscious she’d laugh at him so hard....
He’d like that. She could laugh at silly Ran and his weird feelings for his partner and his prickly shyness as much as she wanted to. He gently let go of her warm, limp hand, wrapped her earring in her fist, and kissed her cheek. “I have to go, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
As he opened the door, he heard something drag. Someone had left a doll in the hallway in front of it.
******************************************************
Tsuzuki heard Aya shout, “--I won’t!” Tsuzuki closed the door behind him.
“There’s a big stir at the hospital,” Tatsumi said. “They’ve noticed she’s gone.”
“I don’t care!”
“You have to be reasonable.”
“No, I don’t. Not about this.” Aya’s eyes were wide and wild. His habitual cold anger had turned hot and featured a large helping of terror in it.
“We can’t keep her here.”
“We let Hijiri--”
“That was different. Temporary. It was an emergency.”
“This isn’t?”
“This is no place for the living.”
Aya pointed to the couch. “You call that living?”
Tsuzuki hadn’t noticed the girl lying there until then. She was young, pretty, and very still. He wondered about the hospital gown. What had Aya been up to?
Watari held and examined a porcelain doll of the kind Muraki favored. Like the girl on the couch, it had its hair in two braids and wore a simple hospital gown, but its hair and eye colors matched Aya’s, red and violet. The eyes “closed” when you moved the doll. When Watari swept its braids away from its ears, Tsuzuki saw that the ears had been pierced but held no earrings.
Tsuzuki started to understand.
“You know what Muraki does to people, especially young girls,” Aya continued. “I would rather kill her myself.” His choked voice and manner suggested that he would turn his sword on himself after that. “Please, sir. Please.”
“We can move her.”
“He can find her!” Then Aya finally noticed Tsuzuki in the room and visibly tried and failed to compose himself. He *vibrated*. “Please leave, Tsuzuki.” It failed to sound as imperious as it would have usually.
Aya didn’t want him to see him like this. Tsuzuki wanted to touch him but didn’t know whether a touch would calm or incite at this point.
“No, he should be here for this,” the chief said. “Tsuzuki, I would like to introduce you to Fujimiya Aya. She’s the focus of our discussion.”
“Then who would you be?” Tsuzuki asked Aya softly.
His eyes blazed. “I’m Aya.”
“And always have been?”
He looked down and away. “No. No, I was Ran. I’m her brother.” Was this what Aya had become a Shinigami for, the thing that made it impossible for him to find peace? Frightening, amazing, how Muraki could embody so many threats and messages in one doll. “I--” Aya put his hand over his eyes.
This was part of Muraki’s plan too, not just to terrify but also to force these confessions, knowing full well how much it would hurt Aya to give them. “Aya,” Tsuzuki said, “I’ll help you protect her. I swear--”
Aya actually looked more disturbed. “Don’t. That’s what he wants. Can’t you see that? Don’t promise that!”
“Why?”
“Then he’d be able to break us both if he ravaged her.”