[fic] The Things We Control - Chapter 66 ~A Second Trip~
Title: The Things We Can't Control
Author:
prettyorianna
Pairing: Akame. Others to be added later.
Rating: NC-17.
Genre: crime drama au
Beta by: my cat Gemma. okay, seriously, nobody
Disclaimer: I don't own KAT-TUN, any of its members, any other JE people. I write this for fun and for other fans of these fine folks. But don't steal my plots, mmkay? I put a great deal of time into them except for when I'm randomly spastically spitting words onto a page. But I value those too...
Summary: Two criminals with vastly different styles meet by chance one day. They immediately clash but is that all they'll ever be? How much is fate and how much choice? And how will their meeting change the world around them?
Author's Note: Past!Kame. Enjoy.
BANNER BY DESHISORABA!! THE MOST AWESOME BANNER EVER AND I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO DISAGREES!
Warning: This gets graphic often occasionally, containing at the very least foul language, character death, nefarious crimes, rape, etc etc.
The Master Posts:
On my journal - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the akame_ Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the akame_fanfics Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the je_kamenashi Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the kattun_fanfics Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
On the jin_fics Community - The Things We Can't Control Master Post
Chapter 66 ~A Second Trip~
Kame wanted to go see Aoi but he didn’t dare leave Yurina alone. He was really worried about her. The first half of the day she was almost completely nonresponsive, just sitting at the little card table staring at the wall. Then the next thing he knew, she was up on her feet, trashing the room. She overturned the table, started throwing things.
When he tried to stop her, she screamed, “DON’T TOUCH ME! DON’T TOUCH ME! Don’t touch me…” and she sank to the floor crying, still tightly clutching the most recent frying pan she’d snatched up.
“Yurina…” Kame murmured to her as he gently pried the pan away from her. “I know you’re angry but you can’t just destroy the place. These things, they belong to your brothers.”
“I keep seeing it…” she sobbed. “All of their faces… I want them dead. I want them dead!”
“I’ll find them. I promise. I just… wanted to give you a few days to recover before asking the questions I need to ask in order to do that,” Kame admitted. “And I really, really think you should come to the prison with me and talk to Aoi.”
“You can’t tell him!” Yurina insisted. “Please! He can’t know!”
“Yurina…”
“NO!” she shouted. “I don’t want them to know. You can’t tell them! Promise me. PROMISE ME!”
“Yurina…”
“PROMISE ME!” she shouted, glaring angrily at him.
What else could he do? “I won’t tell him. But you should.”
“No. No, I just want to find them and kill them and forget,” she admitted as she wiped the tears off her cheek with her sleeve. “Nobody else can know about this. I… They think I’m a good girl…”
“Hey, I told you before, you’re still a good girl. This wasn’t your fault!”
“That’s not what they told me.” Her eyes went sort of misty and wild. “A slut. They told me I’m a slut. That… that I deserved… everything… they did…”
“But you’re not! You didn’t deserve any of that! They’re… they’re just animals, understand? No better than dogs! You can’t believe anything they told you, Yurina. They wanted to punish you; that’s the only reason they said those things.” He should have made that man suffer more. Kame wished he’d known at the time that Abe hadn’t acted alone. He could have gotten information out of him, instead of making Yurina relive the painful memories to give him the details he’d need to track the others down. But he promised he’d deal with them so there was no choice. He’d have to get the story from her.
Yurina didn’t respond to what he said. She just stayed there on her knees on the floor, staring at him.
“Look, I know it’s going to be hard but I need to know what you remember about those people. Are you… do you think you can talk about it or do you need more time? I can give you more time but I am worried that the longer I wait, the less likely it’ll be that I’ll be able to find them. They’ll scatter when they find out Abe is dead. Also, I know they drugged you up pretty badly so it’s going to be hard for you to remember a lot of details. If I could find them without you, I would. But I can’t. So I need you to tell me what you remember.”
Yurina didn’t say anything for a few minutes but finally, “Eight. There were eight others. He… he called one. Said… said…” and she took a deep breath and closed her eyes, “Taro-kun. I got something. That’s what he said. Mentioned a feud between him and one of those others. Said to get them all anyway, that… that… I was good enough they’d forget all about it…” she let out a sob. “Said I was good enough… oh, god… I wanted to fight but I was so heavy…”
Kame helped her up to her feet and the two of them moved to the couch and sat down. “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about that part, the things they did. Just what you remember about the people, okay? I just need to know about the people. Though I’m willing to listen, if you do want to talk about the rest. Sometimes it helps, having someone listen.”
Shaking her head, Yurina said, “No, I don’t want to.” She shuddered. “Just…” closing her eyes once more, she continued slowly with, “Tattoo. One of them had… his back. Red. Flames.”
“Taro? One of the others?” Kame asked, grabbing the notepad off the side table and writing down the name.
“I… I don’t… know. I… don’t know. I… they…” Kame could see tears on her cheeks once more as she spoke. “No, I think it was a different one. I think… Taro was the one that… that…” and Yurina started to shake her head, breaths coming shallow and rapid. “No. No, I can’t… do this. I… I can’t… I can’t do this. No.”
Well, he had information on two of them. If he took that around to the places he’d gone to when he was trying to find Abe, they might be able to lead him in the right direction. And then he could get the names of the others from those two, one way or another. “Okay. Okay. This is good. This is enough. I’ll see what I can do with this. I know some places I can check. But first I’ll go through my records, see if I have anything. I’ll head out after dinner.”
Yurina’s eyes snapped open. “I’m going with you.”
“You want to go with me?” he asked, surprised.
“No,” she admitted. “But I don’t want to be alone right now…”
There had to be some other way. Having her along would not only make it more difficult to find information in the first place; he was pretty sure she didn’t need to see what he did when he finally caught up to those men. Maybe… Ito-san might not mind her presence.
“How about I leave you with my boss? He’s a good man. Almost all of his customers are kind elderly folk from the surrounding neighborhood. You’ll be perfectly safe there.”
She nodded. “When?”
“After dinner, I think.” While he was out, he could pick up a newspaper. See what it had to say about Naito’s murder. He doubted there would be any news on Abe yet.
Actually, it might not be a bad idea to stop at Abe’s place again. If the cops haven’t found him yet, there could be all sorts of evidence there. A high school yearbook would be a big help. And… he’d gone through a lot of his money trying to find her. Drug dealers had money, right? Maybe there was some at his house. So that would be his first stop. From there… his club, the one with the X on the door. That was probably all he’d have time for that night.
Yurina helped him right the table she’d flipped and clean up the broken dishes. Then she insisted on cooking dinner that evening. She was an even better cook than Aoi, which was saying something.
After, the two of them went to Ito’s store.
“This is her?” Ito asked him. “You found her?” He sounded relieved. “I have to admit, I was seriously considering calling the cops if I hadn’t heard from you by tomorrow.”
“You told him?” Yurina sounded angry.
Kame hadn’t thought to tell her he’d mentioned it to his boss. “Just that you were kidnapped by Abe and I couldn’t find you. But it’s good that I did. I never would have found you without his help.”
“I guess I owe you thanks, then…” but she trailed off. She looked exhausted.
“Ne, Ito-san, I was wondering if I could leave her here with you for a while? I have to go out and…”
“Of course.” Ito-san turned to Yurina. “I have a desk in the back, if you want somewhere to sit or you could stay out here and keep an old man company.” He laughed kindly.
Yurina apparently decided Ito-san was alright because she smiled back at him. It wasn’t a bright, shiny smile and it barely reached her eyes, but it was better than anything he’d seen since he brought her back home. It gave Kame hope that she might recover from her ordeal more or less intact.
After excusing himself, Kame went back home to grab the duffle bag he took from Naito’s warehouse and then rode the bus to Abe’s. If the cops had found him, the place would still be swarming with them, right? But the area was deserted. It was probably safe…
The doors were still unlocked like he’d left them. Nothing had been moved. The blood was dry by then.
Looking at what he’d done last night, Kame felt ill. The man had deserved it - indeed, deserved far worse! - he tried to tell himself. But it still turned his stomach that he could just shoot a man over and over, torture him essentially. He knew a thing about that, after all, didn’t he?
That was it. His stomach churned and he barely made it to the man’s bathroom before he was retching in the toilet.
He shouldn’t feel like that, not after what Abe had done.
But Kame couldn’t help but notice he was racking up quite the body count. Ryuichi. Komatsu. Naito and his men. Abe and his two guards. It made him question whether he was any better than those people when it came right down to it.
Still, he had a job to do. He promised.
A thorough search didn’t turn up a yearbook but it did turn up an address book, which was even better. Also, he found a false back in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom which had almost twenty-five thousand dollars hidden away in it along with a large plastic-wrapped block of white powder. He had no use for the drugs but he put the cash in the bag except for a few hundreds which he put in his pocket.
That was everything remotely useful he found in either side of the duplex. Well, there had also been a store of weapons but really, how many guns did they need? They already had three at the house, two from Naito’s warehouse and the one from Abe’s living room drawer.
Searching had taken a lot longer than he’d expected, though. There wasn’t really time to go by Abe’s club if he wanted to make it back to Ito’s before the grocery store closed for the night. So he called a cab using the payphone down the street and had it take him back to Ito’s to get Yurina.
She still looked exhausted, but at least she was making an effort at smiling. That was good, right? Ito seemed to like her a lot, too, saying she could come back any time she wanted to. But before they could leave, he pulled Kame to the side to talk to him.
“Why haven’t you taken her to the hospital yet?” Ito’s voice was flat, somewhat judgmental. “I thought you had more sense than this, Kame-chan!”
“She doesn’t want to go.” He hadn’t actually asked her but it was pretty clear she didn’t want a bunch of people poking and prodding her, even if they were doctors.
“Has she told you what happened to her?”
“Enough. Look, I’ll try to change her mind, but I don’t want to push.” Kame sighed.
Ito-san shook his head. “You don’t have to be a genius to figure out she was raped. She needs to talk about it and she needs to be checked out by a doctor.”
“I’m doing my best, Ito-san. I can’t make her and I’m afraid if I try to, she’ll shut down completely. But I do know people she can talk to who have been through that before.” He didn’t mention that he was referring to himself. That just wasn’t Ito’s business.
“I guess that will have to do…” though he didn’t sound all that convinced at all.
“Look, can I bring her back by tomorrow, earlier? Like, in the morning?”
“Sure, Kame-chan.”
Kame made sure not to forget his duffel bag full of money as he and Yurina left for home. He didn’t tell her what Ito told him. He was pretty sure if he told her that you “don’t have to be a genius to figure out she was raped” she might refuse to leave the house ever again.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
The story continues:
Chapter 67 ~Many Sufferings~
A/N: Okay, this is only half of what I wanted to include this chapter but I don't want to make you all wait any longer so I decide to split it. It should still synch with the present!chapters as far as information release, so it'll be okay.