Cold Case #74 - Jack the Ripper (Part III)
Title: Cold Case #74 - Jack the Ripper
Chapters: 3/3
Author: yumemirunosekai
Pairing: Kamenashi/Ueda
Rating: R (in general)
Warnings: mindfukery, alternate timeline (when, where, and why, I leave it up to the reader's imagination.) alternate world (sci-fi), psychotic!Kame, heavy psychological themes.
Genre: sci-fi, psychological
Synopsis: And with his skill he’d cut & slash, To take a heart of hardened stone, That led a path to darkened graves, For him to walk once more alone - Pete Marshall (Jack the Ripper)
A/N: For scorch66, the most awesome KameDa writer i have ever come across ^o^ So sorry dear, but the fluff/romance level in this fic is close to non existent. Probably because I just finished watching Silence of the Lambs, soooo….. m(_ _)m Please don’t kill me.
Disclaimer: Nope, last time I checked, still don’t own them.
Part II
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The brutal interrogations finally stop, when a murder, also of a female prostitute, crops up one day. Like the previous one, she is ripped to ribbons, and Kame just stares and stares at the body when he sees it. There are flies buzzing around the mangled flesh.
Ueda is awake when Kame arrives home. The first thing Ueda says when he sees Kame is “Where were you-”
But Kame doesn’t let him finish, because Ueda needs to shut up.
Shut up, and just shut up.
It’s easy, because Kame is stronger, and he has the boy pinned to a wall in seconds.
It’s soft, Kame thinks. And also sweet - like toffee apples and ripe cherries. Prostitutes are disgusting. They should taste like the sewer scum that they are, so why? Why does Ueda taste so fucking delicious?
When they finally break apart for air, Ueda’s lithe body is hitched up high against the wall. “What the fuck are you doing?” he pants, eyes heavy lidded.
Kame presses harder up against Ueda, and he whimpers at the sudden friction against his crotch. “Another prostitute was murdered today.” Kame says, never removing his eyes from Ueda’s. “It’s the same killer.”
At once, Ueda’s breath hitches. “W-What?” he whispers, and Kame wonders why he looks so horrified. “H-How-“
“But you didn’t do it.” Kame says, and Ueda looks down at him, frowning. He has his palms on Kame’s shoulders, and his legs are wrapped around the man’s slender waist. “Why wasn’t it you? I was so sure it was you. I’m never wrong.”
Kame looks incredibly lost- lost and so creepily vulnerable that Ueda digs his blunt nails harder into the flesh of his shoulders. The pain makes Kame blink at least. He then lets his lashes droop and dips down to kiss a spot at the corner of Kame’s lips.
“I told you it wasn’t me.” Ueda says quietly. Kame’s hands grip tightly onto his waist. This Ueda os different. This Ueda isn’t the one lying broken and weak-looking against the yellowing sheets on the sterile hospital bad. He’s harder to read, to understand because he knows how to hide from Kame.
Five months with living with him can probably do that to you.
“You are no longer a suspect.” Kame says, and he catches Ueda’s bottom lip, nibbling the tender flesh there.
Soft and pliant. Soft and pliant.
“I never was,” Ueda says, shaking his head. “I’m sure you realised that some time ago. You aren’t stupid. You just let your obsession get the better of you.”
Kame wants to deny it. The most logical explanation to why he kept hold of Ueda because he thought the kid was the killer. That was all. There was no such thing as obsession, because Kamenashi Kazuya isn’t like that. Those interrogations, they were nothing but a means to get Ueda to admit to his crime. They were not some kind of sick release for him because all those days with the younger boy, all Kame wanted to do was to fuck him senseless.
The nights he spends pressed to the far end of the bed, getting up at intervals to check whether Ueda would still be curled up next to him - it was because Kame was afraid the kid would flee. If Ueda ran, he’d have lost his prime suspect, and that wouldn’t be good now would it? It isn’t because he feels bad for wrecking the kid’s mental sanity. It isn’t because he feels guilty, and it most certainly isn’t because he needs Ueda beside him.
It was all professional procedure, and not some psychotic need for control - control over Ueda who would not bend the way Kame wanted him to.
“Do you want to leave?” Kame asks, “Because you can.”
Ueda just gazes at him with those same black-brown eyes. “Do you want me to go?”
“I asked you a question.”
“And I’m not answering it, because that’s a question you should ask yourself. Do you want me to leave? It’s a simple yes or no.”
Kame doesn’t answer. He’s not going to dignify that with an answer. Ueda is a filthy whore, and Kame allowed him into his house, sleep in his bed, and share his food. Ueda has just entered his life and completely screwed over his mind, with his black brown eyes and lips that feel like wet feathers, soft and pliant.
Soft and pliant. Soft and pliant.
The answer should be clear enough.
///
In the heated haze of sweaty skin against skin, low moans and guttural groans Ueda reaches up to shell of Kame’s ear, lips brushing the soft flesh there as his nails rake across Kame’s slick back.
“Do you hear a bug flying around?”
Kame barely hears the question, wrapped in the cacophony of pleasurable sounds he has never heard before.
///
When Ueda opens his eyes, he is sore but satiated.
His heart sinks when he sees the empty space next to him. Groaning a little, he rises and tugs on a pair of sweats that hang low on his hips, bruised with Kame’s finger prints all over. It’s all Kame, Kame, Kame around him. He even smells like the man - a mixture of cologne, musk and sex.
Quietly, he pushes open the bedroom door a crack, and he can see Kame in the kitchen, his back to the entrance. With practised motions, Ueda closes the door quietly and moves toward the armoire and pulls it open. Kame’s freakishly neat arrangement of black and white shirts and slacks greet him. He bends down and rummages through a heap of neatly folded towels and pulls out a gym bag filled with bleach, scrubs, large rolls of garbage bags, steel wool, and bottles of hydrochloric acid as well as camomile and jasmine hand-soap.
It’s heavy, but he’s done this plenty of times, ever since he started living with Kame. It was easy at first, but he can’t believe he actually forgot to clean up this time. It would never do if he forgets another time.
He slings the heavy bag across his shoulder and pushes open the door. Kame is still in the kitchen. Ueda swallows the lump in his throat and approaches the man. He’s at the sink, water turned on at full blast and splashing out of the marble basin.
Ueda wonders why he feels so afraid. He should be used to this. He’s done this before. It’s fine.
“Kame?” he calls out, tentatively.
“What?” Kame replies, over the sound of gushing water. There are empty bottles of soap chucked haphazardly to one side, and the heady smell of camomile and jasmine is choking.
“Do you here a bug flying around?” Ueda asks, carefully.
The man stills, his hands are left under the tap, unmoving, as though he were listening for something. He doesn’t turn around, nor does he answer, but his hand slowly reaches up and swats at the air next to his ear. He shakes head a little, and swats at the air in front of his face.
Ueda watches as Kame gazes around him, eyes darting around the room and swatting thin air at random areas around his head, before he resumes scrubbing his hands. The water runs dark burgundy around the white marble, disappearing with a soft ‘glug, glug’ sound as it flows down the drain.
Quietly, Ueda backs out of the kitchen.
Kame will then proceed to take shower. A long, long shower, before sleeping until dawn. He will remember nothing when he wakes up.
Ueda lugs the heavy sports bag out the door of the apartment, using wet-wipes to clean up the smudges of blood left of the handle and the rails. Occasionally, there’ll be a random drop of blood, or a dark smudge at certain intervals along the way. Ueda cleans up every single one of them.
Kame’s trails are not easy to follow, so it isn’t a surprise to Ueda why no one noticed them. Soon, he arrives at the alley between Kame’s apartment and the building next to it. He smells it first, because the air turns thick and wet as he closes into his destination - Ueda chokes and he has to hold his breath as he approaches the mutilated corpse behind the dumpster. He’s a little worried. Last week was at least several blocks down the street, and the week before was in one of the backroads leading to the slums. Kame is choosing hunting grounds closer and closer to his apartment. This isn’t good.
But Ueda will worry about that later.
He proceeds to do what he always did, ever since he realised that everything was Kame. The murderer - Kame. The righteous detective - Kame. The lonely man - Kame. It was all him, a three in one combination that soon spiralled out of control. Ueda wonders what would have happened if Kame hadn’t taken him in. Would Kame have continued murdering without really knowing that he’s the actual killer? How long would he be chasing himself? What if someone discovers that it’s him?
It’s obvious that Kame’s already unstable psyche was the cause of this all - including the first murder. Ueda isn’t sure how the man held out all those years, living such a detached life.
Ueda thinks what his life would have been if hadn’t been caught as a suspect, if Kame hadn’t been the one to deal with him. Would he still be holed up in the stuffy brothel down in the slums?
Holding his breath, Ueda first slips on the scrubs and yanks out several plastic bags. He picks up the shredded flesh and bone piece by piece, flies buzzing around him, and stuffs them into the bags. It’s hard work, and he almost retches in the process, but he has to do it. He must. Because if Kame is caught, Ueda will be all alone again. Kame is the closest thing he’s ever come to- to-
To what?
To love?
To care for?
No. It just something he’s grown to need. It more of a requirement than a want.
Ueda proceeds to pour bleach over the large pool of almost dried blood, and he scrubs away with the steel wool, rinsing with more bleach. When he’s satisfied with his work, Ueda dumps the used steel wool and empty bleach bottle back into another plastic bag.
He then takes everything and makes his way to an abandoned construction site not far from Kame’s apartment building, just where the road joins to the slums downtown. Perhaps the only good thing about the murder scene being so close to Kame’s apartment is that Ueda doesn’t have to drag bodies halfway across the place just to get to this construction site. The place is littered with junk, but Ueda searches for the large ceramic tub shoved into the corner of a pile of rubble.
He throws everything in, the body parts, plastic bags, and bloodied utensils into the tub. Stepping back to catch his breath for a moment, Ueda then extracts several bottles of hydrochloric acid from his gym bag. It’s amazing just how easy it is to swipe several bottles from the forensics lab down in the station when no one is looking. Ueda is thankful for the poor security and lack of organisation there.
He tips at least 3 bottles of the acid into the tub, and he has to back away as the corrosive liquid eats away at the plastic, flesh, and rubber. Ueda takes extra pains to do this because he is determined to ensure that everything is rendered beyond the powers of modern forensics to retrieve. When everything is reduced to mush, the next part is relatively easy. Ueda douses the remains with gasoline from a nearby can he has prepared some time ago and sets everything alight.
This is the part where he feels most at peace for some reason. Watching the evidence of Kame’s crime burn away is liberating, and Ueda feels like he’s just completed a very important task. He’s protected Kame, again. And he will continue to do so, no matter what Kame does, Ueda will cover it for him, because like himself, Kame is also alone. Two people who have no one, but only themselves to rely on. That’s what Ueda likes to think.
It’s not love, but dependency.
When the fire dies down, Ueda selects the discarded shovel that he’s always used to dispose of the charred ashes from a hidden nook in an overturned cement mixer. He shovels the ashes into a pile of sand, soil and rocks left by the workmen, mixing it until nothing can be told apart.
Satisfied, Ueda wipes the sweat from his brow, erases any traces of shoe prints on the dusty ground, before heading back to the apartment building.
He will then proceed to clean up the sink and replace the empty bottles of hand-soap with new ones that he secretly buys with Kame’s money. He will also take a shower next, and while at it, he’ll wash away the traces of blood left by Kame. He’s really looking forward to getting into bed and snuggling up to Kame who is most likely asleep right now, and who will revert back to the normal Kamenashi Kazuya tomorrow.
Ueda is content to return to what he has now, until he’s once again awoken by the sound of the tap turned on to full blast in the kitchen, and repeats this strange duty he has given himself - to protect what is his.
Ueda plans to scrub the kitchen later.
After all, Kamenashi did seem to be bothered by the bug that is apparently, constantly around him.
A bug that Ueda can’t see.
///
A/N: Well, I won’t blame anyone if they don’t understand squat what’s going on here. I tried to write something with no fluff whatsoever, and it’s HARD. Psychological is SUPER HARD. Why didn’t I realise it sooner? *crais*
Just in case no one gets it, I used the question that Ueda asks Kame: ‘do you hear a bug flying around’ to show that Kame’s other self is constantly being hounded by a bug buzzing around him - relating to the flies that swarm the victims he’s murdered. Only he seems to hear and see it, because it’s him who commits the crimes, and not the real Kame, who at that point is not conscious of his split personality. Basically everything is Kame and his freaky split personality. I’m so sorry if I ruined your inspiration pics because of this completely mindfucked story, but I just couldn’t help myself. LOL.