The bell hung above the shop's front door rang. "Welcome!" Omi immediately said in unison with Ran and Ken, lifting his head up to see who'd walked in.

It was Crawford.

 

Lady Killer 13 -- Kitaku (Homecoming) 3
by K.Huntsman
released 15 September 2003

 

One more rainy night in Tokyo. Ran sat on the corner of Youji's bed, white mug of aromatic coffee warming his hands. He supposed if he had been less inured to the life he had chosen, he might be feeling pre-battle jitters. But he'd been on too many missions for the old Kritiker, killed too many people, spilled too much blood, to be nervous about the next night's meeting.

He had to admit that the alliance with Schwartz was useful in at least the scheduling aspect.

Assuming Crawford was telling the truth.

It had ended up being he and Youji alone, talking about books and philosophy for a few hours. Akayuki was working, and Ken had gone with her. Omi had buried himself in his room with three thick textbooks and orders not to be disturbed unless it was a life-or-death circumstance or they were bringing him snacks. Aya had gone out to a movie with a friend. It was all very quiet, almost domestic.

Ran remembered the last time they'd been alone like this. Had it only been three weeks since they'd returned to Tokyo? That night Omi had located Akayuki working in Shimbashi, and Ken, fixated, had gone to find her. He smiled, remembering.

"What's that about?" Youji, sitting on the floor, back against the open shelves of one of his bookcases, sipped at his coffee.

Ran was confused.

"That smile," Youji clarified.

"I was thinking of our conversation the night we got Akayuki back," Ran said quietly.

"Hmm?" Youji set his mug down and eloquently arched a thin eyebrow. "You've been kind of quiet the last few days. Want to tell me what's up?"

Ran wasn't sure he was ready for that.

"Give, or I give you no more of my coffee." Youji's threat wasn't serious; it never was. But Ran decided to yield a little in the name of friendship.

"Do you remember what you said that night?" Ran asked.

"I said a lot of things," Youji replied. "What in specific's making you smile now?"

Ran bent over and set his own mug on the floor, near the bed's leg rather than by his own foot. "You remember"--and his Kyoto accent that he'd worked so hard to lose was coming back--"when you said I'd fall in love someday?"

"Yeah." Youji leaned back, green eyes glinting. "I am so going to enjoy seeing that, incidentally. You, my friend, are going to be utterly hopeless and frozen and we both know it."

Ran hated his accent, had worked hard to get past it. It sounded so old-fashioned, so formal, so *soft*. But now his tongue was blundering through it, refusing the more clipped, brusque speech he'd adopted after moving to Tokyo. He hated it, hated it as a sign of his nerves showing. "You never said I'd fall in love with a woman. Just 'someone'."

"Yeah. So?"

He could step away, make a joke, turn his intention on its head and lie.

Or... not.

"I was wondering how you knew me better than I knew myself."

Youji stilled. "What are you saying, Ran?"

"I think...." Ran tried to master his speech one more time and failed, Kyoto accent clinging to his voice like a burr now. He gave up. "I think I'm not like you, Youji."

Youji's eyes were serious. "You think you're..." He seemed to be searching for a right way to phrase it. "Not interested in women?"

Ran nodded.

"You're not interested in me, are you?" Now Youji was wary.

Ran snorted. "Don't flatter yourself, Kudou. I know you too well."

"Heh." Youji grinned and brushed his loose bangs back. "Guess you do." Then his mood turned quiet again. "Not that I don't appreciate the confidence, but you do realize how this's going to look?"

Ran tried to follow Youji's train of throught. He was fairly sure the man didn't mean their friendship....

"The gay florist?" Youji prompted. "The schoolgirls are going to be all over that and then the rest of us suffer the same fate in their imaginings." He sighed. "Just our luck for being good-looking. They're going to assume we're all yaoi material."

"If some of them don't already, I'd be surprised."

Youji grinned. "You have a point, my friend." He picked up his mug and waved it at Ran in a salute. "So, what brings on this sudden need for confession?"

"You asked," Ran said flatly.

 

Youji considered. His friend, the gay florist-assassin. Would it make any difference? Ran was still the same introverted, deadly bastard he'd been before the revelation. Figuring out he preferred pretty boys over pretty girls wasn't likely to change his field command competence, his skill with a sword, or the fact that he was the only member of Weiss with whom Youji could enjoy a good argument about morality in classical literature. And frankly, despite Youji's eagerness to laugh at a Ran in love, he couldn't see the man diving headfirst into searching for either sex or romance even now that he knew what gender he wanted in a partner.

So, really, nothing had changed. The only thing that was different was knowing now that Ran might view him--and Omi, and Ken--as attractive objects, sharing Yuki's aesthetic ideals instead of their own. Youji could live with Ran finding him attractive.

Hell, it wasn't even that Youji hadn't questioned the sexuality of other of his teammates. Particularly not given Omi's supposedly secret cross-dressing vice. Youji grinned. He was a snoop, and he knew it. But he also knew how to keep secrets, not wanting to shock KenKen.

Though Ken now constituted a problem in his own right....

 

Yuki didn't particularly like being drunk, but she did like the fact that at the end of an evening of parties she had a strong, handsome bodyguard to take her home. She laughed at the thought and tripped half-deliberately into Ken's arms. "KenKenKenKenKen," she murmured in a happy rush into his chest, inhaling his warm smell, baby powder mixed with other things. "Ken means sword, but that's Ayan, and Ken means knowledge, but that's English, and Ken means health, which means KenKen. My KenKen."

He laughed at her. One hand slid into the nape of her kimono, warming Akayuki's exposed skin. "Where do you want to go?" he asked, his pleasant tenor vibrating against her cheek.

"Ko-ne-ko," she enunciated.

"Not the Yamabuki?"

"Nope. Want to stay with you." Ken was warm, Ken was safe, Ken wasn't like one of her patrons tonight who'd eyed her as though more than her conversation skills were on sale. Worse than the man's lack of subtlety, however, had been his inability to take a hint.

"The Koneko it is, then." Ken walked around the corner of the building to where he'd left his bike. There were two helmets hung hopefully on its handlebars. Yuki accepted the one he handed to her, knowing it would crush her elaborate hairstyle out of shape. She didn't care.

She clung to him, sitting sidesaddle as he kicked the bike to life, a roar that transmuted into rushing wind, crisp air whipping her sleeves and creeping up inside her skirts, breezes circling her calves. Somehow it felt almost like a lullaby or a meditation. The whole world circled and closed into a sphere where the only real things were the bike beneath her and Ken before her. The wind-brushed silence of the ride allowed Yuki to center her thoughts and clear her mind.

It was over too soon as Ken's bike took a right, then a left, then slowed to nothing, coasting down into the garage beneath Kitten in the House. Yuki slipped from the bike as Ken steadied it, then watched as he walked the vehicle back into its slot, white-lined on the cement floor. She handed him her helmet; he stashed it next to his on a wall shelf behind his parking spot.

Rather than drunk, Akayuki now felt a pleasant lassitude, and just a little tired. It was as if the wind had blown all of the alcohol and all of the tension out of her.

She followed Ken up to his room.

 

Ken waited until the door was closed and Yuki had stepped into her house slippers--the pair whose straps were sashiko, a design of interlocking stars quilted with white thread into the indigo fabric--before asking her if she wanted anything to drink. The fact that she hadn't gone up to her own room meant that she might be staying the night with him. It was something that had happened a time or two before and always filled him with panic. He didn't know what to say or how to act around her these days, and always felt tense when she fell asleep in his arms. Waking up hard and wanting her in the morning wasn't easy either. They both slept fully clothed. He would lay money out that she was a virgin, while he was... decidedly not. Even though he came nowhere near Youji's promiscuity.

"Ken-san," she said, not answering his question, and came to him, arms draping around his neck as she laid her chin against his shoulder. Her hair had taken damage during the ride; its stiff shape was crushed. He pulled her against him, dropping his chin so his lips rested on the bare skin at the join of her neck and shoulder. She shivered a little at that. She smelled like lilies and smoke, and under that, a little like her favorite jasmine perfume. So much better than the blood that had been on her the first time he'd tried to kiss her. He lifted his head and she lifted hers in response, and Ken set his mouth on hers.

Somehow, even though she had been an assassin like him, she never smelled of blood. It just washed off of her. He'd seen her kill men in detachment, in anger, in sorrow, but that image never stuck. Instead, when he thought of her, he thought of her as she was now. An artist. A dancer. An athlete. A geisha, pure and lovely, giving, yielding. Healing.

The darkness had never consumed her as it had him, and he clung to that brightness as the lifeline it was.

//Please, don't take this from me,// he prayed, as his hands moved slowly to her obi.

 

Aya knocked on Omi's door with one hand, balancing the tray on the other. It was only a minute until he opened the door.

"Aya-chan?" he asked, sounding surprised.

"I thought you might want something to eat," she explained, nodding at the tray. She'd debated about what snack to make him after she'd gotten back from the movies, then finally decided one couldn't go wrong with traditional food. A thermos of hot green tea sat next to three onigiri. She'd varied the insides--one held salmon, another pickled plum, and the third mackerel.

"Um, thank you." He smiled at her. "Would you like to come in?"

Aya nodded and carried the tray in as he stepped aside, holding the door for her. Her brother probably wouldn't like it that she was in one of his friends' apartments unsupervised, but she was an adult and could make her own decisions.

Actually, she supposed she wasn't quite an adult yet, even though she was indeed twenty. She'd lost three years in a coma, during which hadn't gotten any older at all. So perhaps she was really the same age as Omi. Maybe even a little younger, given that he was in college and she had only just graduated from high school.

"Would you like something to drink?" he asked her.

"Oh, no thank you," she replied. She looked at the thick textbooks stacked on the kotatsu in his living room. "What are you studying?"

 

Yuki lowered herself onto Ken's bed, hands still stroking up and down his sides as he tried to unwind her obi. He'd cursed a few minutes earlier until she'd taken his hands away and untied her light green obi cord, the darker green damask sash, and the persimmon-patterned furoku obi by herself. The first two had fallen to the floor already; Ken was slowly unwinding the four yard length of the last from her body. It felt like an erotic image from a kabuki play. Finally the fabric was gone and dropped on the floor and she leaned all the way back onto the bed, feeling her kimono begin to feather open.

"What do you want?" Ken husked, eyes jewel-dark as they met hers.

"I want to be free," she whispered. "No more customers, no more sister, no more worries." No more being cold and alone. No more believing that her lover and her friends were dead. No more emptiness in her life. "What do you want?"

"I want to touch you," he replied, direct and honest as always.

"Then do." His hands burned, radiating heat that repudiated the fall chill in the air. She breathed in, then out again, as he touched her.

Ken started at her ankle, warmth undoing the hooks on her tabi, tugging them off, one and then the other. His hand ran up her right calf as her legs opened for that touch, her kimono skirt parting for him. He dropped a kiss there, on the inside of her knee; she shivered at the touch. Ken wasn't like those customers, rude and crude, who thought a geisha's calling was service rather than art. Ken knew who she was, all of it, and didn't care. Only Ken.

His hand moved higher and her heart skipped a beat. Never... she'd never been touched there. His heat rocked slowly against her, dark eyes steady and serious on her, then his fingers delved between.

 

Youji didn't have a drop of Japanese blood in him. His mother had been married to a Japanese, but though he had the name the man had given him, Youji didn't share his genes. No, his father had been his mother's much older half-brother. He didn't know if it had been rape or consensual or even if his mother had ever truly been sane. All he knew was that his gold-specked green eyes and distinctly Western features had marked him all his life, made him an outsider even though he'd only been outside Japan once, and that long after he'd joined Weiss.

Ran, oddly in Youji's experience, had never had a problem accepting him as Japanese. Ken had. Omi had asked once why Youji had a Japanese name and spoke without an accent when he was obviously not Japanese by birth. Yuki hadn't, but before he'd told her it all she'd probably figured his past had been something like hers, which wasn't too far off. Even Aya-chan had wondered aloud and been told an ameliorated version of the story. But Ran....

Hell, Ran probably knew better than anyone the troubles of looking different. The guy was pale, with red hair and purple eyes. His features were Japanese, but his coloring was so strange that most people probably thought he used makeup, hair dye, and contacts. Or that he was some kind of demon. Maybe, Youji mused, he was. Maybe one of his ancestors had been a fox spirit. It might even explain why Aya-chan had whatever it was that made SS identify her as a perfect vessel for the demon they'd wanted to summon.

Youji sipped his coffee and did not mention his thoughts to Ran, who, brow furrowed and lips moving silently, was leafing through a thick leather-bound edition of Shakespeare's works.

 

Akayuki moaned, the skirts of her kimono bunched around her waist and her legs spread open like a whore's. "Ken, Ken, Ken," she whimpered repeatedly, clutching him to her. Her hips rocked against his hand. She was beautiful like this, so perfect. Something that someone like him should never soil, never touch. "Ken, please...."

He fumbled his way out of his clothes with one hand, until she started helping, tugging off his shirt, blushing as though seeing him naked was so much worse than having his hand on and in her sex. He scrabbled at the drawer of his bedside table, pulling out a foil-wrapped packet.

"Ken, you don't need to," she breathed. "I've been on birth control since I was twelve."

"I do need to." For a while he'd tried to lose the violence in sex. "I won't risk giving anything to you." He tore the square open and rolled the condom up himself, pinching the tip, wanting more than anything to be inside her, soft, warm, and willing, already. He sat on his heels, erection bobbing up into the air, and pulled her up on his legs. He licked the stickiness from his hand as she watched. "This will probably hurt," he said, not wanting to hurt her, but knowing no other way.

Her smile was old, and slightly bitter. "Living hurts," she said, and kissed him.

He lifted her bodily and lowered her spread legs onto his lap.

Ken was right. She tensed up from the pain of having sex with him. To him, it felt better than anything or anyone. He rested his forehead against her shoulder with a half-sob at her tightness, her heat, her purity.

 

Ran sat on his bed, knees bent up, book resting on them. He'd borrowed the Shakespeare from Youji because he'd never read any of the works before and knew that they were supposed to be good. Youji had particularly recommended the craftsmanship of "King Lear" to him, and so Ran had decided to start with that one. But an hour in, he was still trying to decipher the sixteenth-century English in which the play was written.

"Good my lord," he read out loud, which made sense to him, "you have begot me, bred me, loved me: I return those duties back as are right fit, obey you, love you, and most honour you." There the words began to lose him again. He flipped through his English dictionary to look up "begot," and envied once more all of his teammates' easy skill with the language. Youji and Akayuki had been raised bilingual, Ken was a born polyglot, and Omi was a genius in any subject he tackled. Ran knew he could speak English well enough to get along, but reading this old, poetic dialect was going to cause him a headache. Perversely, he decided he would read every play in the book if it killed him. He was not getting up until he finished this scene at least.

"Why have my sisters husbands, if they say they love you all? Haply, when I shall wed," and there was another word, "haply," that took a dictionary search, "that lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry half my love with him, half my care and duty: sure, I shall never marry like my sisters, to love my father all." One more search, for "plight," and he was confident he had the meaning of the text. It was only then that he turned his attention to the margin notations, scribed in pencil in Youji's cramped English writing.

"Go, Cordelia!," Youji wrote. "Duty versus personal feelings. Shakespearean values similar to samurai codes? Cordelia definitely a hottie." Ran smiled and shook his head. Only Youji.

 

It was good, and it was fast, and then it was over. Just like life. Ken numbly peeled the condom off and dropped it into the wastebasket before returning to his bed, where Yuki lay, still half-dressed, on top of the messed-up sheets. Her eyes were almost closed, a smile drifting across her lips, her hair completely wrecked. She looked more like a whore or a sprawled doll than a white geisha. She closed her eyes and snuggled into his pillow.

How could she be so at ease? Every muscle in Ken's body was tense like violin strings. It felt like he was on a mission, about to kill. The adrenaline that sex had inspired in his body wasn't going away. It wasn't enough. And she was so satisfied. She didn't look at him, didn't think of him, just cuddled his pillow.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, just looking at her. Her eyes half-opened again, looking at him. Her smile widened, like a cat that she hadn't been codenamed for, and one hand reached for him, coming to rest on his forearm. She tried to tug him down onto the bed with her.

The feeling of sickness colored his vision yellow and his hand lashed out, catching her face with the blow. He could see the shock in her, her tension, the way she let go of him, her hand flying to her cheek as though she couldn't believe he'd hurt her lily-white body.

"Ken-san," she whispered.

It was better this way, he told himself as she backed away, holding her kimono shut and grabbing her obi. She wasn't a whore and she couldn't cure him. It was better that she not be dragged down into the abyss with him.

The emptiness consumed him as he heard his front door slam shut.

 

Youji turned his bedside lamp on, eyes blinking at the glare, as he heard knocking at his door. He'd only just fallen asleep. But whoever it was at his door, it was probably important. So he shuffled out through the living room without turning the lights on, only banging his bare shoulder into one wall, unlocked the latch and deadbolt, and opened the door.

"Kitten?" he inquired stupidly. She was half-dressed at best, dark obi held in one hand, trailing on the ground, as she clutched her kimono shut with the other. Her feet were bare, and--

Youji's breath hissed as he turned her face to one side. The hall light didn't provide enough illumination, so he turned on his lights without a thought.

The beginnings of an ugly bruise covered most of one side of Yuki's face.

"Who did this?" he demanded. "I'll kill him."

Then he looked into her eyes and his dinner turned to sour stone in his stomach.

"Ken," he said.

"It's between him and me," she said, her voice small.

"Fuck that--"

"I SAID, it's between him and me." Her voice was no louder, but it was steel.

Youji's mouth opened to protest, but he bit it back. He had to respect Akayuki enough to let her decide that. Ken obviously didn't. "Fine. If he does it again, though, I will kill him."

 

Youji had done everything he could for her. He'd sat her down and gotten ice for her bruise, which she'd held dutifully against her cheek until her teeth had started to ache from the cold, and made her hot tea, chamomile and jasmine mixed, and finally given her one of his sweatshirts for nightwear and tucked her into his own bed, preparing to be a gentleman and take the floor.

"Youji-san," she said softly, "don't."

He looked up from where he was laying blankets down to make a mattress. "I'm not going to risk getting between you and Ken, Kitten."

"He already did that himself," she replied. "I'm not letting you sleep on that cold floor." Youji looked mulish. Akayuki smiled, despite the pain it caused. "I know you can be a perfect gentleman, Youji-san. So stop being stupid and sleep here where it's warm. Where you won't wake up with your bones aching in the morning," she added, playing on the familiar card of Youji's advanced age.

He stared at her for a minute longer, then decided "Fine. If you're sure." He gathered up the blankets he'd been layering and dumped them at the foot of the bed before sliding under the covers. Already his bare back was cold. Akayuki snuggled close to him, trying to warm him up.

After a while he sighed and rolled over onto his back, putting his arm around her shoulders. She rested her head on his shoulder.

He didn't make a comment when some time later she started to cry quietly. He just stroked her hair.

 

Author's Scribbling: Hot off the presses. It's been rather a while since I wrote domestic abuse, so I hope it came across well. It's also been a while since I wrote a heterosexual sex scene, so I hope that came across well as well. I once again seem to have borrowed a line of N-chan's, this time from her X story Kanriki. As always, I am indebted.

And as for the relevation of Ran's sexual preference... I could say "hey, it's me" and let that be my explanation, but above that, it simply felt right in the story for him to come to this conclusion about himself. And there is a slight pun involved in his reading material... Kurosawa's version of King Lear being a movie called "Ran."

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