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Die Fürsprache (bait and switch)	By : quietladybirman Category: Weiß Kreuz > General Views: 2406 -:- 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.

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Die Fürsprache

(bait and switch)

a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

________

+ penitence

The slam of the door is a subtle anticlimax.

Schuldig should have left like thunder. Strange that he should just smile and turn and walk away as if it didn’t matter after all, hands in his pockets and the cigarette burning, half-forgotten, between his lips. He says nothing more, doesn’t even look back. Youji hardly knows why he should have expected him to. What did any of it ever mean to Schuldig? Give the Schwarz a week and he’ll almost have forgotten tonight: give Ken a lifetime and he’ll never manage that. Nor, Youji knows, will he.

I’m going to kill Schuldig, Youji thinks, and the thought is a curious kind of comfort, like huddling under the blankets when down with the flu. It hardly helps, it doesn’t change a thing, but it’s a comfort all the same. I’m going to goddamn kill him, and I'm going to smile. Do you know that, Ken?

“Ken?” Quietly, even experimentally, he calls his friend’s name. “Hey, Kenken?”

I'm sorry. Youji isn’t surprised to get no response. He had never expected one— are you all right, Ken?

Not a bit of it. Frowning Youji turns from the door, forces himself to look back at his friend (your fault: Youji knows it and wants to turn away but, a penitent, doesn’t) and he flinches sympathetically at the sight of him. Ken’s back is a nightmare of bruising and torn tissue; blood and semen spatter his thighs. He shivers, he is cold. His presence is an unsubtle indictment, his condition a damning verification of Youji’s own culpability. Ken wanted you to live.

Selfishly, he catches himself wishing Ken were furious, or weeping, or screaming – anything as long as it wasn’t this, wasn’t the total, scrupulous nothingness of deep and overwhelming shock. His continued silence is worse than anything Youji could have imagined though Ken’s shock, he knows, is under the circumstances nothing to be wished away. With any luck shock would be keeping him from the worst of his pain and would do so at least until they got out of here and could do something about it. Better Ken feels nothing than that he is in agony. He’d been hurt enough already.

“Okay.” Youji says softly to the empty air. “Okay.”

His own half-forgotten wounds tug at him with forceful hands, demanding as discontented children resentful of his determined inattention, but Youji forces pain back, pushes it brusquely aside. He feels, he realizes, lightheaded, strange, his fingers feel cold and his mouth desperately dry – fundamentally terrible. Christ, how much blood has he lost? Forget it, don’t think about it, he can give in to pain later… it seems to take him a long time to make his agonized, inching way to Ken's side, dragging his near-useless leg behind him. He is barely conscious of the indignity of his advance or of the slippery, malevolent smears of blood that mark his progress and he feels himself start to smile when, reaching out, the tips of his fingers brush lightly against one of Ken's bare shoulders. After that it seems easy.

His vision twists when he sits, his grim little world warping crazily. It feels like drunkenness, as if he’d overdone it at the last bar of the evening and his body were protesting his decision to stagger home rather than waste money he no longer had on a cab. Closing his eyes briefly, Youji rides it out and within seconds unpleasant reality reasserts itself, finding him caught in a gloomy basement by the bound and naked body of the closest friend he possesses, the both of them dazed and bloodied and horrified…

“Oh, Ken.” I'm sorry. I’m so sorry.

Almost without realizing he is doing it, Youji brushes a few strands of hair from Ken’s uncomprehending eyes and passes a hand across his brow. Even through the gloves Ken's skin feels cold. Looking down at him – he hasn’t moved, has given absolutely no indication he is aware of Youji’s presence – Youji sees nothing but a vacancy. On some level Ken isn’t there any more. He is unreachable; beyond caring, almost beyond help. Instinct has Youji shrugging off his heavy coat and draping it over Ken, covering him up as best he can before turning his attention to loosening the wire that still cuts into the boy’s sluggishly bleeding wrists.

There is more blood before long. Youji curses under his breath, and leans over and grabs at the fallen shirt Ken usually wore tied around his waist. So, the damned thing turns out to have a purpose after all…

Later, he suspects much later, with Ken lying in his lap – Ken still feels cold, so damned cold and he shivers, and hangs heavy in Youji’s arms as if he were already dead, and stares into the empty air as if it holds something fascinating but the look on his face, unnervingly, is one of strange serenity – Youji wonders apropos of nothing at all, how in Hell are we going to get out of here? So far he has forced himself to ignore pain but he understands only too clearly the hold that debility has on him. Won’t be walking out of here. How long have they been trapped in this place? It feels like hours. It feels like life.

The mission – Youji realizes he has almost forgotten the mission – feels as remote and irrelevant as his schooldays, leaving the flower shop little more than a distant dream, something another man did in another lifetime… their need to flee is desperate and impossible. The plan was to blow the place up, to destroy the evidence – when? When will that be? The others (Weiss being something else that has slipped his mind almost completely; he is only Youji, Ken merely Ken, two unremarkable young men in the wrong place at the wrong time and paying the price for it) he thinks must have left long ago.

Which is why he starts at the sound of footsteps on the stairway, at first barely heard over the endless drip of water and the measured rhythm of his heartbeat but growing louder, clearer, and flinches when Omi cries his name.

“Youji-kun! You… oh my God.”

For a moment Omi looks exasperatedly grateful, his lips parting in preparation for delivering a gentle rebuke only for his blue eyes to grow wide and troubled as he glances around the room. Already there is nowhere for Ken to hide… but what, Youji wonders, about me? Can I hide? Or has Omi already guessed there’s something else wrong here?

(Can Omi guess I was here when Schuldig— does he know Schuldig raped Ken, and made me watch him do it?)

Youji watches as Omi gazes about himself, disturbed by detail, taking in the blood tracked across the floor and smeared on the walls, the scattered clothing all of which he can easily identify as belonging to Ken, the unmoving figure wrapped in Youji’s coat and lying limply in his arms. He can’t quite fathom the purpose of the piece of fine wire (is it Youji’s?) dangling from the catwalk and glittering wanly in the half-light. There is a faint line of moisture, he notices, in the corner of Youji’s eyes though the willowy blonde barely seems to realize it. Five, maybe six breaths and wan, ghostly Aya, half swallowed up by the darkness, appears in the doorway behind him.

“What happened here?” Aya breaks the sudden silence, understated suspicion slipping into his narrow eyes.

“Schwarz,” Youji manages, and the word seems to stick in his throat. He feels Ken stir uneasily in his arms as his grip on his battered body tightens and he pulls him protectively to his chest as if hoping to shelter him from their teammates’ eyes, their well-founded suspicions.

“And…” Omi – case-hardened, resolute Omi – looks aghast. Aya frowns, his eyes unexpectedly troubled. Brutality strikes home that much harder when it becomes personal; it always does. Youji can guess the conclusion the teenager has come to and wishes he could tell him, no. You’re wrong, Omi. It’s not what it looks like— it’s exactly what it looks like. “And Ken-kun?” It sounds almost as if Omi hardly wants to know the answer. He knows far too much already.

Youji sighs. “He’s alive,” he says finally. Then, softly, definitely, despairingly, “Just get us out of here.”

Even that is harder than it sounds.

Ken, it is obvious, needs to be carried out. Youji claims he can walk, if helped, but the few inches he has on Aya make it more demanding than it has to be for the redhead, one of Youji’s arms slung across his own shoulders, to get him onto his feet and out of the door.

They have to leave Omi and Ken in the basement at first. Omi, kneeling on the floor by Ken's side holding his disregarded clothing in a bundle, anxiously watches them leave. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to stay (… he’d played it safe with the fuses on the explosives; the mission had gone badly and everyone makes mistakes and Omi likes living but they should have been gone long ago, how long does that give them now?). Torn between two friends, he hardly knows where to look, let alone who he should be more afraid for…

“But you’ve been shot, Youji-kun…!”

“Stay with Ken.”

Youji pretends not to mind leaving Ken. Pretends to be exasperated by needing Aya’s help, forcing an unconvincing smile to his lips and repeatedly asserting that he is doing fine; Aya, all grim stoicism, doesn’t contradict him though the determined weight of him pressing across Aya’s shoulders and back and the understated grimace on his face as he struggles to walk tell their own story. The deception is only made clearer when Aya helps Youji into the back seat of his half-hidden car.

Even the inadequate light cast by a feeble and apologetic urban moon Aya can tell Youji is flatly and unnaturally ashen, his face pinched and scored with the unmistakable marks of hard-repressed agony. Blood on his flank and the forearm he has pressed to it, blood running down the leg of his pants and dripping soundlessly to the car’s floor; exertion has opened the wounds again. Glancing almost without meaning to down to the scarred ground, Aya purses his lips when he notices the bloody rosettes picking out their route. There are painkillers in the dashboard, but giving them to a teammate with an abdominal wound might do more harm than good.

Youji leans heavily and uncomfortably into the seats, head back, breathing harsh and labored. Aya watches as he slowly and deliberately wets his lips. He suspects him of drifting toward circulatory shock, realizes he must have underestimated the extent of Youji’s injuries. Not only that; Youji must have. It must have been sheer tenacity, or fear likewise, that had kept him alert for this long.

Ken lets go, slipping quietly into unconsciousness somewhere between basement and car. What else is left to him?

“I’ve got him,” Youji says wearily, opening his eyes and drawing Ken to him.

“Youji,” Aya says warningly. “Don’t push yourself—”

“I’ve got Ken.” Youji cuts him off; his voice, though hoarse, is firm. “Just drive, Aya.” And lets his eyes slip closed again.

He misses Aya’s brief frown and the look that he exchanges with the consternated Omi – two moves ahead, always two moves ahead and hating the patterns he sees form on the board – misses the way that apprehension suddenly redoubles in the teenager’s blue eyes. Shivering and abruptly aware of the chill Omi swallows hard, gazing after Aya as the young man turns away and hurries to the front of the car. Only too obvious what was forced upon Ken, but what of Youji?

…Youji-kun, how much did you see?

But he can’t ask that question. It’s not his place to.

There is nothing else to say. The silence seems to linger between them as Omi scrambles into the front seat, snatching for the safety belt as Aya, already behind the wheel, guns the engine and pulls away far too fast. Distantly, but not nearly distant enough for Omi’s comfort, he thinks he hears the rumble of an explosion; he turns to Aya wide-eyed and is reassured by the look of resolution on his teammate’s face. Aya won’t give in now.

The car has reached the highway, the now-burning complex safely behind them, before Omi turns troubled eyes to Aya who, eyes on the road, mind firmly on contingency plans, cover stories and the location of the nearest hospital, is speeding as he heads back into the lazy late-night city. Why, Omi wonders forlornly, can’t things be normal? why can’t he be dozing in the back, half his mind on the homework he hasn’t yet finished, silently cursing a frustrated and fidgety Ken for his inability to keep still and wishing his teammate had taken his motorbike to the target site instead of catching a lift with Aya?

Aya’s expression, the subtle tightening of his grip on the steering wheel, the set of his jaw as he incautiously overtakes a weaving late-night sedan, probably carrying a drunken, weary salaryman home to his frustrated wife and the children he hasn’t seen awake since Sunday, all suggest anxiety. The air in the car is thick with the unmistakable copper taint of newly-spilt blood. Nothing unusual there Omi knows yet tonight the smell seems somehow worse, more pernicious, for being the blood of his teammates and not those of their targets.

“What now?” He can’t believe he’s asking that question, but at least it breaks the heavy silence. “This isn’t the way home…”

“We’re not going home,” Aya says bluntly. “We’re going to a hospital.”

A hospital? Omi falls briefly silent, twisting in his seat to glance over his shoulder at the huddled figures of his teammates, then looking warily at Aya out of the corners of his eyes. “It’s… is it really that bad, Aya-kun?” He asks in a very small voice. Peering over Aya’s shoulder into the back of the car as he placed the insensible Ken gently down on the seat, Omi hadn’t really had a chance to get a good look at Youji before the door was closed on him. He couldn’t be that badly hurt, could he? “Can’t we do this ourselves?” We normally get by alone, don’t we?

Why is he asking? Omi doesn’t know. Yes, they normally get by alone, but this isn’t a normal situation.

“No, we can’t.” Aya replies briskly and calmly and why shouldn’t he be calm? He is simply stating the facts. “Youji’s lost too much blood. He needs to see a doctor, Omi.” He needs surgery, but Aya doesn’t say that. He isn’t sure if he holds back for Omi’s sake, or if it’s for Youji’s. He doesn’t like the continued silence from the back.

“Oh,” Omi says softly; just for a moment, he looks and sounds like the seventeen year old he is supposed to be but the moment passes. “What are we going to tell them,Aya-kun?”

Aya hesitates for a moment; a stranger might not have picked up on it but to Omi, who knows Aya, his uncertainty is palpable and worrying. “We should leave it to Kritiker. They’re the experts,” He says tersely, then hisses in frustration and cuts his sudden, sharp way out of lane and across three carriageways, onto the off-ramp he nearly missed.

Omi nods, swallowing hard. Some things it’s simply not possible to explain away. This one needs far more than a hastily-concocted cover story: the implications of bringing a bleeding assassin into the emergency room of a public hospital go far further than that. Handling serious injury has long been a sticking point for Weiss: there’s only so far anyone can go with the kitchen table and a medical kit, and only so many excuses. Far better to leave it to Kritiker to kick over their traces.

Hospitals are inconvenient places to hide. Normally scrupulously updated and carefully stored patient records will, somehow, have to fail to be correctly completed or expediently go missing shortly after filing, hospital workers and the occasional inconvenient witness will need bribing or bullying into silence – in the face of the health service’s mania for data collection and record-keeping, far more work will be needed to keep things discreet, stop the awkward questions before they can be asked, than Weiss could manage alone… No, Omi thinks, Manx can do it; it is, after all, what she’s there for. No convenient lie Aya or himself could come up with would be good enough to justify a dazed and bloodied dead man showing up with gunshot wounds. And Ken… what could they ever find to say about what had happened to Ken?

(They can’t rationalize rape.)

“What about Ken-kun?” Omi hears himself say. Aya shoots him a single sharp look from the corners of his eyes. Omi ignores it, refuses to be cowed. “I checked him over while you were helping Youji-kun back and from what I’ve seen he’s not been that badly hurt, physically speaking at least. We can call a doctor ourselves if we have to. And…” he breaks off, sighing and turning to gaze pointedly out of the side window at the hushed, blurred, night-dark streets, “I honestly don’t think a hospital’s going to do him any good at all right now, Aya-kun.”

Hospitals mean doctors mean questions. Omi doesn’t like the thought of walking out and heading back to the Koneko leaving Youji alone in a resus room, surrounded by the unfamiliar faces, little more than half-glimpsed beneath hairnets and hastily-donned surgical masks, of ER personnel as they hurriedly prepare him for emergency surgery, swiftly inserting IV lines, rushing through pre-op checks and calling for rapid-induction anesthesia, but he doesn’t like the thought of handing a plainly distressed Ken over to a skeptical, unsympathetic doctor, a gaggle of incredulously giggling nurses, either. Quite bad enough that they, Weiss, knew what had been forced on him without involving a good dozen hospital staff, a counselor Ken wouldn’t want to talk to now or ever, Manx and Kritiker…

No. Not possible. Easier to let the doctors handle it all but Omi understands this isn’t about what they, Aya and himself, might consider the easier option, or what they think best. It is only about Ken, about what he would have been holding out for had he been able. Omi knows Ken. He knows Ken wouldn’t want a hospital involved if there was any way around it. He wouldn’t want anyone involved who didn’t have a damned good reason to be.

Right now Ken doesn’t need anything a hospital could give him. He only needs to feel safe.

“Ken-kun doesn’t need a hospital,” Omi says, surprised by the determination in his voice. “We’re going to take him home.”
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Die Fürsprache (bait and switch)