Identical
Title: Identical
Recipient: genkischuldich
Author: gwonam
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Schuldig, Crawford and black magic rituals.
Warnings: None.
By the time Schuldig made his way to the apartment building in Shibuya, it was already twilight. Street lights blinked slowly on around him as he turned off the main street into the maze of misnumbered buildings, his hands in his pockets, head down against the wind that cut right through the thin cotton of his shirt. Since the Elders had really begun to move people into the country, the weather had gotten progressively more fucked, and he was pretty sure it was no coincidence... though it could be just for show. You never knew with them, not for sure. Schuldig was okay with that, but it had driven Crawford nuts and there had been hours of inspecting minute, boring details of weather forecasts and historical garbage.
The building he stopped in front of was squat, long, and narrow; from the outside it had absolutely nothing to recommend it - which was really just as well. He could hear Crawford inside, though, the faint tug of his familiar mind masked behind apartments full of blandness.
Behind him, the last of the street lights struggled to light, flickering on and off for a few moments before finally gaining power. Inside, a housewife absentmindedly closed the building's last set of open curtains against the dark.
To Schuldig's annoyance, the door to the third apartment on the second floor was locked. He considered picking it, decided against it; considered knocking, then decided that pointing out that he'd been locked out would probably turn out to be more trouble than it was worth.
Crawford, he thought instead, reaching in and giving him the mental equivalent of a tap on the shoulder.
Crawford opened the door, glancing him over briefly. You're late, he replied, his thoughts terse, clipped, controlled.
Schuldig was pretty sure that it didn't matter if anyone here overheard them, but he shrugged it off, closing the door softly behind himself and relocking it. "It took me a while to get them settled," he said, following Crawford through the small room to the open doorway beyond.
Inside, the two girls lay side by side on a narrow cot barely broad enough to hold them; the rest of the room had been draped and covered with cheap white sheeting, and when Schuldig took a step inside, plastic crinkled slightly underfoot from beneath it. "But you've been busy anyway," he added, then moved further inside to look more closely at the unconscious girls. They weren't quite like twins; Fujimiya's sister was slightly darker of hair, with a sharper cast to her features; then, of course there were the needle marks at her wrists from years of IVs - and the way her mind curled in on itself in twisting cords like a tangled knot, keeping her unconscious without the bother of the drugs he'd slipped to the other girl.
"Hmm." Crawford was ruffling through something atop a plastic-and-cloth-covered table, his back to Schuldig. "How did you distract Nagi?"
A shrug, a lazy grin. "I hinted a little that he ought to find a better hiding place for his girlfriend or I might find her."
He could feel Crawford's answering amusement, picture the slight quirk of his lips, though he was straight-faced when he turned around and handed Schuldig a small knife. Behind him, Schuldig caught a glimpse of a backpack, not quite shabby but nowhere near new; a good match for the casual shirt and pants he wore. Schuldig had half expected him to show up with a briefcase.
Taking the knife, he brushed the blade lightly with his thumb, testing it: razor sharp. "Secondhand store?"
"Yes." While Schuldig had been looking at the knife, Crawford had emptied the pack of a coil of red cord and six stubby white candles. "You didn't bring anything traceable." Not really a question, but even as a statement it was interesting enough; it wasn't often that Crawford was uncertain enough about things so immediate and important that he had to doublecheck.
"New clothes, new shoes," he answered the non-question, laying the knife down on Sakura's stomach and accepting two of the candles that Crawford passed over. "No phone, no nothing, and I wasn't followed."
Crawford gave him a sharp look, but nodded. "Good."
The candles smelled odd, a little like moth balls and a little like vinegar. Looking over at what Crawford was doing with his pair, he followed his lead, putting one on each side of the cot, just underneath it. As Crawford took the other two and headed to the door, he picked up the cord and looked it over, but didn't see anything unusual.
"Tie their wrists together," Crawford said from the doorway.
Schuldig grinned. "This is going to be one of those kinds of rituals?"
"Fujimiya's right hand to the other girl's left." He didn't sound particularly amused, but Schuldig was willing to let it go for the moment. With the girls unconscious and practically on top of each other, it was easy enough, though perhaps not as satisfying as it could have been... but they did want this quick and fast.
"How tight?" he asked after he'd wound the cord around several times and the unused length still trailed nearly to the floor.
Crawford definitely sounded impatient now, beyond just tense. "Use all of it."
Rolling his eyes, Schuldig wrapped the cord til the binding reached nearly up their forearms, then tucked the end in; he'd secured the first loops well enough that he wasn't too worried about it coming undone. "You're the one who knows this shit," he told Crawford pointedly over his shoulder, dropping the girls' arms back down to the cot. "Where the hell did you pick it up, anyway?"
"Where do you think?" Crawford finally moved away from the doorway. He had put a candle at each jamb and spread something between them that glittered vaguely white against the cotton dropcloth.
"I didn't think they were the type to share shit like this," Schuldig said, picking up the knife again and looking Sakura over briefly. She'd already given him a hell of a lot more trouble than he usually let people get away with, and he hadn't really paid her back... yet. That'd change soon enough, though.
"They aren't."
"So you stole it?" That, for sure, was worth finding out more about.
Crawford didn't answer. Schuldig frowned, tilting his head back slightly. "Secrets, now?"
"This isn't over." Crawford's gesture took in the girls, the room; his inflection covered far more.
"Afterwards, huh?"
It didn't escape Schuldig that Crawford didn't precisely answer that, either, but by then Crawford was rolling up his sleeve and clenching his fist. "There's a bowl in the pack," he said. "Bring that and the knife, and put the pack outside."
Abruptly interested again, Schuldig crossed the room to the backpack and fished the bowl out; it was the only thing left in, and - "Is this a soup bowl?" he asked as he moved past to toss the pack out the open door, careful not to step in the mounded line of glittery dust at the door. The bowl was black and red lacquer, slightly chipped on the edge, and looked more like something fitted to a cheapish restaurant than a ... whatever the hell it was that they were doing.
"Never mind that." (So it was a soup bowl.) "Just come here."
Crawford took the knife from him, leaving him holding the bowl, and nicked his wrist over it; not too deeply, but enough to get a decent trickle of blood flowing and pooling in the bottom of the bowl, dark red against a brighter orange.
"Hope you don't expect me to bleed into a soup bowl for you," Schuldig told Crawford as he stepped away, pulling a bandage from his pocket and wrapping it around the wound.
Crawford gave him a rather sardonic look. "When I want your blood, I'll tell you," he said, and before Schuldig could work out a good response to that, he went on. "Stand at the cot, between the candles, and smear the blood on their foreheads."
It was such an odd request that he did it, dipping his thumb in the bowl of Crawford's blood and scrawling twin wide red streaks. Nothing happened.
He turned his head to look at Crawford, raising an eyebrow. It was wasted; Crawford wasn't looking at him, but staring off into the middle distance, expression simultaneously blank and guarded.
Then everything happened at once: Crawford said something, which Schuldig afterwards could not remember - not as if it had been removed from his mind, but as if he had simply never heard it. All six candles burst into spontaneous flame, flaring up more like torches for a moment. The bowl in Schuldig's hands cracked with a loud snap and split in half, covering his fingers in the leftover blood as he managed to keep the two pieces of it from falling to the floor. Behind him, there was a soft, frightened cry from the cot. He spun to find both of them still apparently out cold, but with the blood gone from their faces - and on closer examination... perfectly identical.
"Well, fuck," he said, surprised despite himself. He put the halved bowl down and wiped the blood on his hands off on one of their hospital gowns. "It worked."
"Of course it worked," Crawford muttered. (Now was probably not the best time to point out that he'd sounded a little unsure of the whole thing earlier, Schuldig decided. Not while they still had the room to clean up, two unconscious girls to get back across the city unnoticed, and one to smuggle into Eszet's tower.)
Below the table and across the room, the candles guttered out as independently as they had lit, and Crawford came to join him by the cot, untying the cord that bound the girls, then rewrapping it around Sakura's wrist alone. It was as good a way to make sure they could tell the girls apart as any other, Schuldig supposed.
"Were they supposed to notice?" he asked after a minute or two, glancing over. Crawford looked more than focused; a little strained, maybe a bit grayish, as if what they'd done had been incredibly heavy work.
"What?"
"The girls," he said.
"They're unconscious," Crawford said with an air of forced patience. "No, they weren't supposed to notice anything."
"What about the noise they made?"
Crawford said something that was drowned out in another gasping whimper, much like the one he'd heard before - and very much not physical, not audible. Reaching out, Schuldig brushed his fingers across Fujimiya's forehead, pushing in - and nearly losing himself in a fraying tangle of thoughts, wild and formless compared to the tight, knotted perfection it had been earlier, before...
"...you doing?" Crawford was saying.
Schuldig jerked his hand away as if the touch burned, the beginnings of a headache starting to crawl up the back of his spine as her mind extended slowly, webbing outwards.
"She's waking up," he said.
Recipient: genkischuldich
Author: gwonam
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Schuldig, Crawford and black magic rituals.
Warnings: None.
By the time Schuldig made his way to the apartment building in Shibuya, it was already twilight. Street lights blinked slowly on around him as he turned off the main street into the maze of misnumbered buildings, his hands in his pockets, head down against the wind that cut right through the thin cotton of his shirt. Since the Elders had really begun to move people into the country, the weather had gotten progressively more fucked, and he was pretty sure it was no coincidence... though it could be just for show. You never knew with them, not for sure. Schuldig was okay with that, but it had driven Crawford nuts and there had been hours of inspecting minute, boring details of weather forecasts and historical garbage.
The building he stopped in front of was squat, long, and narrow; from the outside it had absolutely nothing to recommend it - which was really just as well. He could hear Crawford inside, though, the faint tug of his familiar mind masked behind apartments full of blandness.
Behind him, the last of the street lights struggled to light, flickering on and off for a few moments before finally gaining power. Inside, a housewife absentmindedly closed the building's last set of open curtains against the dark.
To Schuldig's annoyance, the door to the third apartment on the second floor was locked. He considered picking it, decided against it; considered knocking, then decided that pointing out that he'd been locked out would probably turn out to be more trouble than it was worth.
Crawford, he thought instead, reaching in and giving him the mental equivalent of a tap on the shoulder.
Crawford opened the door, glancing him over briefly. You're late, he replied, his thoughts terse, clipped, controlled.
Schuldig was pretty sure that it didn't matter if anyone here overheard them, but he shrugged it off, closing the door softly behind himself and relocking it. "It took me a while to get them settled," he said, following Crawford through the small room to the open doorway beyond.
Inside, the two girls lay side by side on a narrow cot barely broad enough to hold them; the rest of the room had been draped and covered with cheap white sheeting, and when Schuldig took a step inside, plastic crinkled slightly underfoot from beneath it. "But you've been busy anyway," he added, then moved further inside to look more closely at the unconscious girls. They weren't quite like twins; Fujimiya's sister was slightly darker of hair, with a sharper cast to her features; then, of course there were the needle marks at her wrists from years of IVs - and the way her mind curled in on itself in twisting cords like a tangled knot, keeping her unconscious without the bother of the drugs he'd slipped to the other girl.
"Hmm." Crawford was ruffling through something atop a plastic-and-cloth-covered table, his back to Schuldig. "How did you distract Nagi?"
A shrug, a lazy grin. "I hinted a little that he ought to find a better hiding place for his girlfriend or I might find her."
He could feel Crawford's answering amusement, picture the slight quirk of his lips, though he was straight-faced when he turned around and handed Schuldig a small knife. Behind him, Schuldig caught a glimpse of a backpack, not quite shabby but nowhere near new; a good match for the casual shirt and pants he wore. Schuldig had half expected him to show up with a briefcase.
Taking the knife, he brushed the blade lightly with his thumb, testing it: razor sharp. "Secondhand store?"
"Yes." While Schuldig had been looking at the knife, Crawford had emptied the pack of a coil of red cord and six stubby white candles. "You didn't bring anything traceable." Not really a question, but even as a statement it was interesting enough; it wasn't often that Crawford was uncertain enough about things so immediate and important that he had to doublecheck.
"New clothes, new shoes," he answered the non-question, laying the knife down on Sakura's stomach and accepting two of the candles that Crawford passed over. "No phone, no nothing, and I wasn't followed."
Crawford gave him a sharp look, but nodded. "Good."
The candles smelled odd, a little like moth balls and a little like vinegar. Looking over at what Crawford was doing with his pair, he followed his lead, putting one on each side of the cot, just underneath it. As Crawford took the other two and headed to the door, he picked up the cord and looked it over, but didn't see anything unusual.
"Tie their wrists together," Crawford said from the doorway.
Schuldig grinned. "This is going to be one of those kinds of rituals?"
"Fujimiya's right hand to the other girl's left." He didn't sound particularly amused, but Schuldig was willing to let it go for the moment. With the girls unconscious and practically on top of each other, it was easy enough, though perhaps not as satisfying as it could have been... but they did want this quick and fast.
"How tight?" he asked after he'd wound the cord around several times and the unused length still trailed nearly to the floor.
Crawford definitely sounded impatient now, beyond just tense. "Use all of it."
Rolling his eyes, Schuldig wrapped the cord til the binding reached nearly up their forearms, then tucked the end in; he'd secured the first loops well enough that he wasn't too worried about it coming undone. "You're the one who knows this shit," he told Crawford pointedly over his shoulder, dropping the girls' arms back down to the cot. "Where the hell did you pick it up, anyway?"
"Where do you think?" Crawford finally moved away from the doorway. He had put a candle at each jamb and spread something between them that glittered vaguely white against the cotton dropcloth.
"I didn't think they were the type to share shit like this," Schuldig said, picking up the knife again and looking Sakura over briefly. She'd already given him a hell of a lot more trouble than he usually let people get away with, and he hadn't really paid her back... yet. That'd change soon enough, though.
"They aren't."
"So you stole it?" That, for sure, was worth finding out more about.
Crawford didn't answer. Schuldig frowned, tilting his head back slightly. "Secrets, now?"
"This isn't over." Crawford's gesture took in the girls, the room; his inflection covered far more.
"Afterwards, huh?"
It didn't escape Schuldig that Crawford didn't precisely answer that, either, but by then Crawford was rolling up his sleeve and clenching his fist. "There's a bowl in the pack," he said. "Bring that and the knife, and put the pack outside."
Abruptly interested again, Schuldig crossed the room to the backpack and fished the bowl out; it was the only thing left in, and - "Is this a soup bowl?" he asked as he moved past to toss the pack out the open door, careful not to step in the mounded line of glittery dust at the door. The bowl was black and red lacquer, slightly chipped on the edge, and looked more like something fitted to a cheapish restaurant than a ... whatever the hell it was that they were doing.
"Never mind that." (So it was a soup bowl.) "Just come here."
Crawford took the knife from him, leaving him holding the bowl, and nicked his wrist over it; not too deeply, but enough to get a decent trickle of blood flowing and pooling in the bottom of the bowl, dark red against a brighter orange.
"Hope you don't expect me to bleed into a soup bowl for you," Schuldig told Crawford as he stepped away, pulling a bandage from his pocket and wrapping it around the wound.
Crawford gave him a rather sardonic look. "When I want your blood, I'll tell you," he said, and before Schuldig could work out a good response to that, he went on. "Stand at the cot, between the candles, and smear the blood on their foreheads."
It was such an odd request that he did it, dipping his thumb in the bowl of Crawford's blood and scrawling twin wide red streaks. Nothing happened.
He turned his head to look at Crawford, raising an eyebrow. It was wasted; Crawford wasn't looking at him, but staring off into the middle distance, expression simultaneously blank and guarded.
Then everything happened at once: Crawford said something, which Schuldig afterwards could not remember - not as if it had been removed from his mind, but as if he had simply never heard it. All six candles burst into spontaneous flame, flaring up more like torches for a moment. The bowl in Schuldig's hands cracked with a loud snap and split in half, covering his fingers in the leftover blood as he managed to keep the two pieces of it from falling to the floor. Behind him, there was a soft, frightened cry from the cot. He spun to find both of them still apparently out cold, but with the blood gone from their faces - and on closer examination... perfectly identical.
"Well, fuck," he said, surprised despite himself. He put the halved bowl down and wiped the blood on his hands off on one of their hospital gowns. "It worked."
"Of course it worked," Crawford muttered. (Now was probably not the best time to point out that he'd sounded a little unsure of the whole thing earlier, Schuldig decided. Not while they still had the room to clean up, two unconscious girls to get back across the city unnoticed, and one to smuggle into Eszet's tower.)
Below the table and across the room, the candles guttered out as independently as they had lit, and Crawford came to join him by the cot, untying the cord that bound the girls, then rewrapping it around Sakura's wrist alone. It was as good a way to make sure they could tell the girls apart as any other, Schuldig supposed.
"Were they supposed to notice?" he asked after a minute or two, glancing over. Crawford looked more than focused; a little strained, maybe a bit grayish, as if what they'd done had been incredibly heavy work.
"What?"
"The girls," he said.
"They're unconscious," Crawford said with an air of forced patience. "No, they weren't supposed to notice anything."
"What about the noise they made?"
Crawford said something that was drowned out in another gasping whimper, much like the one he'd heard before - and very much not physical, not audible. Reaching out, Schuldig brushed his fingers across Fujimiya's forehead, pushing in - and nearly losing himself in a fraying tangle of thoughts, wild and formless compared to the tight, knotted perfection it had been earlier, before...
"...you doing?" Crawford was saying.
Schuldig jerked his hand away as if the touch burned, the beginnings of a headache starting to crawl up the back of his spine as her mind extended slowly, webbing outwards.
"She's waking up," he said.