Coming Home | By : katami Category: Weiß Kreuz > General Views: 2558 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0 |
Disclaimer: I do not own Weiß Kreuz, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story. |
Author’s Notes: Many thanks to all those who have reviewed and to the great gretel-chan who was kind enough to beta this.
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By eleven he was pleasantly wasted. Buzzed enough to make the voices around him nice and fuzzy, a loud presence that still filled his world, but bearable because they were indistinct. Just noise instead of a thousand screaming voices. His shields were also worse but he was not drunk enough to have totally destroyed them. That was the trick to drinking when one was a telepath - to drink enough to dull the voices but not enough to fuck up your shielding. It was something he had mastered years ago - in the time before Rosenkreuz. Rosenkreuz didn’t subscribe to his philosophy and instead suggested only limited alcohol intake for telepaths - like if they weren‘t shot, they didn‘t need any booze.
He raised his glass in a silent mocking salute to his trainers and took another shot. He had been forced to doing vodka shots after sampling the Japanese, American, and Australian beers available and learning that if he wanted good beer he would have to go back to Germany because the Germans were the ones to have gotten it right. And unfortunately, he wouldn’t be going back any time soon. Not until Brad Fucking Crawford and Esset said he could. He had to dance to their tune for awhile, because the only other way back was going back to Rosenkreuz.
He shivered and took another shot before lighting a cigarette, the memories of his time at Rosenkreuz were lurking nearer to the surface than he liked, the alcohol numbing his control but not his memory. Nothing could numb his memory. Not all the drugs in the could because Rosenkreuz was the one thing he still feared; it was death.
Or at least it was for him.
Crawford was his last chance at field work. If he failed with Crawford then it was back to Rosenkreuz and the labs. Memories of white rooms assaulted his brain and for a moment he wasn’t sure if they were his own or stolen from others. It didn’t matter; they all end the same way…a wash of blood and a cold slab of meat that used to be a person on an examining table. He shivered and took another drag on his cigarette, cursing his weakness and fear even as he was helpless to do anything about it.
He’d had three teams before Crawford and Schwarz; Esset wouldn’t assign him to another. The only reason Crawford had gotten him was that he was the strongest telepath to emerge from Rosenkreuz in thirty years, something far too valuable to be wasted in the labs until it was proven he was totally uncontrollable rather than just unstable. Unstable was normal in a telepath; uncontrollable was unacceptable in anyone trained by Rosenkreuz. If he failed with Schwarz he would be reclassified and after that all that awaited him was dissection by Rosenkreuz’s scientists as they tried to figure out what made his gift work.
The bartender put another shot in front of him, keeping them coming as Schuldig had told him to hours before when he had begun drinking. He knocked it back quickly, taking another hard pull on his cigarette. Brad was going to give him shit for his little bender, maybe even beat him, but at least a little pain would help focus him.
He growled faintly as Bradley Crawford once again filled his thoughts. Crawford confused him. The pre-cog was unlike anyone Schuldig had ever met, hard and brutal and yet…not. Violence was never Brad’s first resort, instead it was always carefully applied for the maximum results with the minimum damage. It wasn’t what he had learned to expect from Esset personnel or those who had come out of Rosenkreuz.
Esset not only believed in the use of violence, they encouraged it. Pain taught fear and Esset liked its agents afraid - at least of Esset. It helped ensure they remembered their place - under Esset control. Brad didn’t work toward making the rest of Schwarz fear him though, he demanded respect and obedience…but not fear. It was a subtle but important distinction. One Schuldig could recognize even if he couldn’t understand the motives of the man behind it. That was what made Brad so fascinating for him. Brad didn’t respond the way Schuldig expected him to, the way the Elder‘s golden boy should have responded.
Brad should be cold and brutal - he had beat the shit out of both Schuldig and Farfarello when they stepped out of line. But Brad was also something else, something gentler. It was Brad who had handled Nagi’s more…childish moments. Got the kid settled and made him feel safe. And it was Brad who was trying to find an antipsychotic for Farf - one that the Berserker’s body couldn’t breakdown. None of the other team leaders Schuldig had worked with would have bothered doing either of those things. But Brad did.
The only person he didn’t help was Schuldig. With him it was all rigid rules and structure - everything straight out of the fucking manual. And it was driving him straight to the fucking edge. He couldn’t take Tokyo pounding on his head and Bradley Fucking Crawford playing enforcer to Herr Kiedel’s rules - not at the same time.
Not without going mad.
He growled faintly as the noise level went up a notch, his control slipping away in a wash of impotent frustration. Thousands of people going to lunch, their stupid little brains babbling about food and errands and other meaningless shit rushed in to fill his mind. His head began pounding as voices began to once again emerge from the noise, screaming their mundane little shit directly into his brain.
He snuffed out his cigarette viscously, his teeth cutting into his bottom lip as he clenched his fists tight enough to draw blood. The pain was him. The blood he tasted was his own. He was the one hurting, everything else was them, he was the one hurting. Gritting his teeth he shoved at the voices, heaving them out of his mind for one earth-shattering moment. One moment in which he was once again alone in his skull - just Schuldig.
He snapped his shields back up and took three shots in quick succession. The alcohol hit him hard and left him dizzy but had once again dulled the voices into a uniformed wall of noise. He gave a shuddering sigh of relief and sat on the bar stool trembling and panting, not sure how much more he could take.
The wall of noise the was joined by the ringing of a cell phone. He ignored the first few rings, thinking the need to answer was just a random bit slipping through from someone else - that had happened a few times. There were just too many thoughts to block them all out. Finally the bartender asked if he was going to answer that and he realized the ringing phone was his.
He growled at the little thing, punching buttons and cursing Crawford for getting him the fucking thing. That uptight asshole couldn’t have gotten him a normal phone; no, he had to buy the fucking top of the line piece of shit that Schuldig wouldn’t have been able to figure out even if he hadn’t been drunk.
Finally he got the little thing working and Brad’s voice washed across his senses. “Schuldig. Schuldig! Where the hell are you?” Brad growled in a tone that went straight to his cock, commanding and powerful. He snarled faintly at his idiotic libido, Crawford was hot as hell but he was also a fucking prick. And the last thing Schuldig needed was another prick in his life. Five years in Rosenkreuz had exposed him to quite enough.
“Schuldig!”
“Ja, ja. I heard you the first time, Brad,” he snapped, the faint light of the bar suddenly seeming too bright. The pressure on his shields seemed to grow but he knew that was wrong. His concentration was slipping and so his shields were slipping as well. God damn that miserable son of a bitch Crawford!
That stern voice was calling him again, firm and angry, demanding his attention. He tried to force his mind back around to it but he couldn’t catch the words, there were too many other little whispers slipping in and distracting him. He growled faintly, swatting at them, but for each whisper he managed to shove out, six more took its place. “Shut up, already!” he snarled at the voices.
“Excuse me?” Crawford’s tone was sub-artic and as hard as steel. Schuldig knew the tone, had heard it thousands of times before when he’d pushed one of Rosenkreuz instructors too far. It was the tone they used right before they call Herr Kiedel to come and deal with his little problem child.
He shuddered and felt his stomach give a nervous flutter at the thought of Kiedel. His very own boogeyman. The man who had recruited the boy he had been for Esset, who had murdered his family in the dead of night, and who he had killed three years later in a tiny cell - he second victim. Dead. The bastard was dead, he reminded himself, but no matter how many times he said it, some small part of him refused to believed. He could hear the bastard laughing because while Kiedel was gone Brad Crawford remained.
And Schuldig had the feeling that Brad Crawford was the far more dangerous one.
He tried to calm the flutter of butterflies in his stomach as Crawford growled menacingly at him. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t. He had been beaten before. He had been raped before. He had been tortured and brutalized in ways that most people would never have imagined in their worst nightmares. There was nothing more they could do to him. Some tiny part of him didn’t quite believe it though because it was screaming…
No, that was the woman in the far booth. And the hysterical laughter was the man two stools over. And the man in the booth behind him was telling Brad that it was nothing, that he was talking to someone else. And the guy with him was curled up crying. The bartender had his arms wrapped around himself and was shaking, too scared to cry.
Brad was talking to him again, yelling at him, but he couldn’t hear it. All of Tokyo was screaming in his head…or was that him?
He didn’t know. Couldn’t tell. He was fracturing, breaking into a million little pieces, and every second was dragging more and more of him further and further away. Burying him under a sea of voices that weren’t his own as they stole pieces of him. Killing him.
Herr Kiedel‘s laughter welled up from his nightmares as Brad Crawford‘s anger loomed before him. ‘No escaping this time. No where to run,’ taunted Herr Kiedel from the depths of his memories.
He snarled, fear turning to anger in the space of a heartbeat. He had beat them! He had survived. He had not knelt to Herr Kiedel or Bradley Fucking Crawford or anyone else, and he was not going to kneel for a bunch of fucking sheep! He tore himself back from the edge, ripping away those pieces of himself that had begun drifting free and pulling them back heedless of the damage he did. Blackness overtook him for a moment and he knew he had strained something as the faint taste of blood reached his lips.
He wasn’t sure how long he was out, it hadn’t been long though, he could tell that much. The others who had been in the bar with him were either dead or comatose - and he didn’t think they would be waking up. He wiped at his face, sweat mingling with blood on his hand as he stared at it dumbly. Finally it dawned on him that his nose was bleeding, he had pushed too hard and burst something in his head and his nose was bleeding.
The voices came back slowly, trickling in, incomprehensible and confusing, a whisper that grew to a roar. They drove him from the bar and out onto the street. The noise was worse there and all he wanted was to get away. To get someplace quiet and curl around himself and nurse his hurts. He stumbled down the street, not sure where he was or where he was going, just wanting to get away from the voices.
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