mirabella (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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mirabellafic2010-06-05 10:19 pm
mirabella) wrote in mirabellafic2010-06-05 10:19 pm
Entry tags:
Arcadia fic, Shindou/Touya, PG-13
So, um.
I posted Arcadia!Isumi over on my personal DW, andlindensphinx was like "Are you ever going to finish that two-parter?" and I was like "...Wait. I didn't?"
I didn't. My bad - I totally was convinced that I had not only finished it but posted it. At any rate, here it is.
The sergeant is hanging half in Touya's office doorway, face lit with feral excitement, and the only thing Touya can liken this moment to is the first seconds of a gunshot wound.
No, he thinks, no, and tells himself afterward that he meant it wouldn't be that easy.
"We've got him," the sergeant says again.
Touya stands, reaching for his keys, already measuring the steps between his desk and his car. "I'm on my way."
By the time he reaches Akihabara, driving much faster than is safe with his vision full of the strobing lights of the patrol cars running silent in front of him, that initial reaction has grown to a gut-level certainty: something is wrong. This isn't one of those apparently-disastrous moves Shindou makes that turns into an insurmountable challenge thirty hands later; this is someone else's game, again, and Touya can't quite put his finger on how he knows. Not because Shindou wouldn't pick up a woman in a bar, take her out, and kill her – of course he would, he's Shindou, he does that sort of thing. But the setup, the first hands after staking territory, they're all wrong.
I won, Touya reminded him, weeks ago.
Yeah, yeah, you don't play fair, Shindou muttered, disgruntled. But he reached for Touya's hand anyway, laying absent kisses along the pads of Touya's fingers as he thought. Okay, here's one. If she leaves my sight after the first time I talk to her, even just to go to the bathroom, she's safe. I don't know what she's doing, y'know? She could be calling somebody, friends or her mom, sending them a picture of me on her cell phone or something. Girls nowadays, they're so paranoid.
An anonymous tip, and who would have made it, and when? Shindou's good; he doesn't brag, doesn't threaten, doesn't decompensate, doesn't give people the creeps. The dispatcher said it was a woman's voice. His victims never see him coming.
Someone else's moves. Someone else's game; but Shindou is playing it too, and Shindou plays against Touya, always.
Touya shears around a corner, down a dark street, leaving the convoy of patrol cars behind. He knows where he'd take a victim from that bar, if he were Shindou, if it's Shindou at the bar at all. There are a handful of warehouses in a line by the docks, mostly empty, free of nocturnal activity because they're rumored to belong to the Yakuza; Touya knows that to be true, but Shindou knows them to be empty and isolated, and if he's here with a victim, he'll want space to maneuver. He's never liked being confined, never liked the tiny, delicate waltzes in corners for a single flawless point that some players delight in. Shindou flings stones over the whole board at once like he was scattering rice grains for an offering and it's anyone's guess where the next battle will be. He kills the same way, leaving crime scenes that are some of the largest Touya has ever seen. If he's not in those warehouses somewhere, then he's not here tonight at all, and Touya can go home and pretend he isn't waiting for the phone to ring.
In the end, Touya very nearly misses it. There's a silver sports car parked behind a dumpster to the side of an old clothing import warehouse; if he hadn't glanced that way at just the right moment to see the streetlights reflecting where they shouldn't, he wouldn't have seen it at all. His first instinct is to whip around and into the gravel lot, but Shindou will hear, and there will be a dead girl and a pissed-off serial killer waiting for Touya on the warehouse floor. Cursing between his teeth, Touya drives farther along the docks before he turns around; cuts his lights two blocks away, cuts the engine at one block and coasts, gliding to a silent halt in the shadows of another building.
Unnerved, he pulls out his gun and gets out, surveying the warehouse for the best angle of approach. The ground is unstable under him. If that's Shindou in there, there's no telling how long he's been there or whether he's killed the girl already – or who made that call, which of all things is the question Touya really wants an answer to. If it was her, if Shindou made someone that nervous, it means he's starting to decompensate at long last; but if it was, why would she be here with him? And if it was someone else, why not warn her before she left a bar with a man who tears women apart with a piano wire and a long-bladed knife?
Why not call the police back to tell them Shindou was gone?
Touya eases his hand through a broken window to unlock a side door, and can't decide whether to laugh or shoot himself; because what he really wants is to talk it over with Shindou, to sit down and replay moves with him until they've figured out what it all means.
"I know, but I set up here all the time," Shindou's voice floats to him, drifting on air currents that break on the concrete walls around Touya and make it impossible to tell exactly where Shindou is. Touya moves carefully forward, sweeping his foot in front of him before he takes a step; Shindou has ears like a fox, and it will only take one shard of breaking glass for him to realize someone else is in the warehouse.
There's a girl's voice, giggly and tipsy. Touya can't quite locate her either, and so he ignores her altogether.
"It's the whole urban decay thing," Shindou says, his voice dark and silky in a way Touya has never heard. "Magazines go nuts over it."
Touya's in a dark hallway, following the distant sheen of moonlight with dust clouding around his feet and creeping into his lungs. He thinks he's going to come out onto the main warehouse floor soon. The safety has been off his gun since before he came into the building.
"You should do a shoot for me," Shindou says as though the idea has just occurred to him. "The whole Neo-Visual Kei thing, y'know, it's beautiful right now, really reaching its peak."
Shindou's victims don't conform to any particular type, which is part of what's made him so difficult to catch; but if Touya has gleaned any sort of pattern from them, it's that Visual Kei reminds Shindou of something he'd rather tear out someone else's eyes than be reminded of. If he'd gotten to this girl before Touya found them he'd have ripped her apart like a one-man wolf pack and left her insides unraveled on the warehouse floor. Touya's going to save her life if he can, but he'll at least save her from that. He moves faster, praying for luck and a clear floor in front of him.
Not too far away, Shindou gives a dreamy, pleased hum. "Yeah, I bet you could," he purrs. "Let me see. Right, just… let me look at you in the light. Stay there, let me see what you and the setting have to say to each other, 'kay? Move your head, just a little, just… like this…"
Touya steps out into the main warehouse, still in shadow. Shindou is standing in the moonlight, behind a girl a head and a half smaller than he is despite the bright plumage of her hair; his head is tilted, his body liquid with the pleasure of anticipation, and right now there's nothing human in the cold depths of his eyes.
He's behind her, close enough that his breath is stirring her hair, one hand on her neck, fingertips encased in smooth leather sitting lightly on her chin. A blade slides silently out of his other sleeve and into his fingers like a rattlesnake in a Pentecostal preacher's hands, glinting in the moonlight. Unrealizing, the girl laughs and strikes a pose, hips angled seductively back into the planes of Shindou's body.
Touya puts a bullet into the pillar behind Shindou, spraying him and the girl with shattering cement.
The sound of the gun is deafening in the hard space and Touya is the only one who's ready for it. Shindou's fast, but Touya is faster; he reaches the girl first and yanks her away, shoving her behind him and putting distance between the two of them and Shindou. She's keening with terror, scrambling away from both of them, and Shindou is furious.
"Police," Touya snaps at her. "You need to stay back behind me. Do you have a cell phone?"
"What's happening?" she screams.
"Take your phone, go into the hallway, and call the police –"
"You said you were the police!"
"Yeah, Touya," Shindou says, lazily malevolent, spinning the knife in his fingers with unnerving skill. "Aren't you the police? I'm just asking, y'know, because I thought a cop would have called for backup before he came in here."
"You had a victim in here who might still be alive, Shindou. There wasn't time."
"Not time to make a radio call?" Shindou takes a slow step forward.
"Look," Touya snaps back at the girl. "Believe I'm a police officer or don't. Either way, the guy you came here with just pulled a commando knife on you so I think it's safe to say that if anyone's trustworthy here it's not him. Take out your phone, call 110, and run!"
"Not cool, Touya, I was just about to head into yose," Shindou says, moving another couple of steps forward. Touya takes a step back, checking in his peripheral vision to make sure the girl is out of Shindou's reach. "Tell you what. Walk away. I'll give her a two-minute head start, swear to god. Not like she's gonna get far in those shoes, huh?"
"What's in this for me?" Touya asks bluntly. "Or her, for that matter?"
"Nothing's in it for you, Touya, I'm not feeling too charitable toward you right now so this is the best you're going to get. You walk away, I'll hide my eyes and count to a hundred while Alice Nine there runs for it, and if you're both lucky she might get away." The tiny curl of Shindou's lip suggests that he's about as optimistic about that outcome as Touya is. "Either way, whoever I kill next, her or someone else, I'll make it quick. She won't suffer, I promise. You keep trying to block my connection, though, and so help me the next one I kill, I'm going to keep her alive for hours, just cutting pieces off one after the other –"
"Shindou," Touya says, trying to push his gorge back down by sheer willpower. "Your problem is with me right now. Let's settle it between the two of us. Don't be a coward; play me on the goban I'm sitting at."
Shindou's head jerks in that convulsive glance back over his shoulder; he's pissed off and now he's upset, and Touya doesn't want the sudden realization that he's not the only one in this room trapped halfway between his lover and his opponent.
"Don't," he says quietly. "Shindou. He's gone and I'm here."
"You sure about that?" Shindou whispers, tilting his head a little so his eyes are shadowed from the moonlight by the bright fall of his hair.
"Maybe I don't want to be sure of it," Touya says. "Maybe there are some things I want him to know. Maybe I want to be the one who tells him."
"Tells him what?"
"That in the end, he wasn't good enough," Touya says.
It's a toss-up as to which is a greater shock: the gunshot that nearly deafens him or the way the girl's head explodes into the space between them, blood and brain matter and sharp skull fragments splashing across the floor.
Shindou freezes, wide-eyed. Almost on instinct, Touya lunges forward and takes him down to the ground, hands tight on his own gun and Shindou's knife to keep them out of the way as he rolls the two of them back into the dark where the moonlight doesn't reach. The warehouse is empty, no boxes to give them cover; so he shoves Shindou down onto the floor in the shadows and stands in front of him, gun trained back along the trajectory of the shot that killed the girl. "Drop your weapon and come out," he orders.
"You expect that to work?" Shindou snarks from somewhere around Touya's knees.
"You'd be surprised," Touya says between his teeth. "Shut up and stay down."
"You know, it'll be really interesting if he listens to you," says a voice out of the darkness across the warehouse floor.
In his entire career, Touya has only actually shot his gun a handful of times before. He's never shot to kill. Intellectually, in theory, he doesn't want to start tonight. "Identify yourself."
For long seconds there's silence. Then, finally: "That kind of hurt my feelings, Touya-san. I mean, I know you can't take time off from your busy schedule of obsessing over Shindou to notice the people around you, but I've been helping out on this case for six months. I've read all your notes. I've seen all the case files. I even know the number of your private Shindou hotline."
Touya's eyes widen in realization; Shindou pokes him lightly in the knee, clearly thinking along the same lines.
"I got you a birthday present," the newcomer says in a fair imitation of Shindou's voice. "I guess you could say I made it for you."
Strangely enough, it's the imitation that brings a name and face swimming out of Touya's memory. "He's a patrolman," he whispers to Shindou. "His name is Shouji."
Shouji, who had followed Touya like a puppy around the copycat kill site, getting more and more sullen as Touya listed the reasons the kill couldn't be Shindou's.
"He's a cop?" Shindou hisses. "God, Touya, don't you guys screen your applicants?"
"Shut up," Touya whispers back, and moves a step away. "Shouji, what are you doing? You didn't have to kill that girl."
"She found her cell phone," Shouji explains. The sound of his voice is moving in the dark, circling the floor in Touya's direction. Touya moves along the wall toward him, silent and hopefully unnoticed. "I couldn't let her call the cops, could I? C'mon, none of us wants that."
"You killed that other girl and tried to make Touya think it was me," Shindou says; Shouji isn't forgiven for that, and never will be, for however many swift-flowing minutes remain of his life. "That was stupid. Touya knows how I work."
Shindou's standing now, and moving, Touya can tell from the sound of his voice. Gritting his teeth, Touya actually finds himself debating whether he has time to find Shindou and hit him over the head, because an unconscious Shindou generally does more or less as he's told.
"So do I," Shouji says. "I said I'd read all the case files. You're fucking brilliant. That girl in Kyoto, two years ago? What you did with her eyes? I had that photo as my desktop wallpaper for six months. I thought there was no one better than you… until I tried to go up against Touya myself and he shut me down right there at the crime scene."
"He's not with you," Shindou whispers. Touya can't place him now; he and Shouji are both lost in the shadows and the dust glimmering in the moonlight. Touya keeps moving and prays he finds one or the other of them before they find each other. "I thought for a while he was, but he'd never have settled for this. He was kind of a bitch about not wanting any other gods before him, y'know?"
"Shindou, there are nine rounds left in that gun. Be quiet," Touya snaps. "Shouji, what are you trying to accomplish right now?"
"I could learn to play Go, you know," Shouji says quietly. "I've been sort of teaching myself, but I could get better. I wanted Shindou dead and I wanted you to never know the difference. Like… like people used to think that if you killed an enemy and ate their eyes and their brain all their powers would pass to you. I could be him, and you could play me instead, nobody would have to know the difference but us."
"You little bitch," Shindou says. "My kills are mine. Touya is mine. You're not eating any goddamn part of my body, metaphorically or otherwise."
"If you meet the Buddha on the road," Shouji says, and fires.
Touya's gun swings toward the muzzle flare, and he realizes with five pounds of pull on the trigger that he can't shoot not knowing where Shindou is. He fires low instead, sparking up hard concrete shrapnel from the floor at Shouji's feet. Shouji gives a shout, stung and surprised, and the next thing Touya sees is two bodies, a knife, and a gun tumbling over each other into the moonlight. He can't get a clear shot, but it doesn't matter – they're apart in seconds, scrambling to their feet. Shouji levels his gun at Shindou and looks toward Touya, who steps out into the light with his gun pointed at Shouji's head. Shindou is twirling the knife in his fingers, inching closer to Shouji; Touya moves a little to the side, angling so that Shouji can't quite see both of them at once.
Shouji is wearing a red shirt with a bright 5 blazoned on it and black skater shorts; the same clothes, or nearly the same, as Shindou was wearing in the one surveillance photo the police have been able to find. The front of his hair isn't bleached, not yet. Touya wonders if he's saving it, one last reward to complete his transformation.
"Say the word," Shouji says to Touya. "I'll blow his brains out. You want that, don't you? Him dead, I mean. He's a monster, right?"
"I want him in prison," Touya says, and doesn't even care if it's the truth or not anymore. If Shouji believes it, it might buy Shindou his life, and that's all Touya cares about right now. Everything else can wait.
"I want you dead," Shindou says. "I bet I outrank you."
"Shindou," Touya says.
"You owe me one, Touya," Shindou says in a surrealistically reasonable tone of voice. "I didn't kill that Ochi guy, not yet. Besides, c'mon, what else are you going to do with him? Let him sit in an interrogation room and tell your supervisors all about how you got between me and his gun?"
Touya has been trying not to think about that. He thinks about it now, knowing that the best thing to do – the only thing to do, his duty both technically and morally – is to shoot both of them and see if he can save Shindou from bleeding out onto the warehouse floor before the paramedics get here. Save him for trial and prison, buried under tons of concrete isolation for the rest of his life, fangs drawn until he learns how to use new weapons.
"There are no surveillance cameras here," he says finally. He's smart and resourceful, and later he'll find a way to have this mean something other than compromising himself beyond repair. "It would be my word against his."
Shindou sidesteps, trying to circle Shouji so that his back is to one or the other of them. Shouji steps back instead, keeping both of them in his peripheral vision, gun still trained on Shindou. Touya wonders what he's looking for, that he doesn't just shoot.
"Shouji, listen to me," he says. "The game is over, but I can still save your life. Put the gun down and move away from Shindou."
"You sure you want to do that?" Shindou asks Shouji. "Touya's all alone with two serial killers and no backup. The only reason either of us is still standing is that Touya's That Guy and he wants us to go to prison instead of getting shot like dogs. You walk right up to him like that and it would take a better man than Touya not to be tempted to get one of us out of the way and even the odds."
"Shindou, shut up!" Touya snaps, circling so that Shouji is between them again.
Shouji moves back another step and swings the gun around so it's pointing at Touya. "So what are you saying, that I should kill him instead?"
"You kill him," Shindou says, very quietly, "and you have no fucking idea how slow you're going to die or how long you're going to beg for it."
"Put the gun down, Shouji," Touya says.
Shouji swings the gun back to Shindou. "You should want him dead," he tells Touya. "Whether I'm alive or not, you should want him dead. Why don't you just shoot him?"
"Why don't you?" Shindou snaps.
"Because he knows," Touya says, realization churning slow and sickening in his gut. Shindou and Shouji both turn to look at him, cold eyes narrowed in the dim light. "He knows if he kills you there'll be nothing stopping me from gunning him down, and I think in spite of everything he wants to live. Right, Shouji?"
"Why?" Shouji grates.
"Because his Go is the most beautiful thing I know," Touya says, taking a step closer. "And you don't play."
Shouji turns instinctively, a little too far. Before he can correct himself, Shindou is moving; and before Touya can do anything, say anything, Shouji is nearly lifted off his feet by the force of the stab wound in his back. The gun in his hand swings around and goes off, sending a bullet whistling by Touya's ear close enough to ruffle his hair; Touya ducks, rolls, and comes up with a punch that knocks Shindou off his feet. Shouji drops like a rock, and Touya kicks the gun out of his hand, into the dark.
It's too late. He knows that even without turning Shouji over; Shindou knows his business too well, and the dark pool under Shouji is spreading too fast. He tries anyway, turning Shouji onto his stomach and putting compression on the wound as best he can. "I'm calling for backup," he says. "Hold on."
Shouji chokes out a bitter laugh.
"Akira," Shindou says, not unkindly. "He's as good as dead already. C'mon, you would have wound up shooting him anyway and you know it. He wasn't gonna just hand over his gun and get in the back of the squad car."
Touya rubs the back of his hand across his forehead, hearing the sharp edge of hysteria in his own laugh. "Fuck you, Shindou. I could have –"
"Could have what?" Shindou asks simply.
The pool is still spreading, soaking into the knees of Touya's pants. He thinks Shouji might already be dead; he doesn't bother checking. Shindou is right… about too many things.
"He figured it out," he says. "Next time it could be someone else, someone who's not a serial killer. What then?"
Shindou stretches out a hand and pulls Touya to him, out of the pool of blood. Settling in beside him, Shindou leans his forehead against Touya's. "Shh. We're careful," he whispers. "We've been careful since the first time I called and asked you to play Go with me. I think Shouji only figured out part of it, anyway. Not this, not us."
Touya leans into the touch of Shindou's hand against his face. He's shaking, he notices absently, and so very tired. "And when someone does?"
Shindou kisses him, soft press of mouth on mouth, careful in this as well. "I've got plans for that day too," he breathes.
"What plans?"
"Trust me," Shindou says. "I l… I'll let you in on them some other time. Okay? Go home. I'll clean up here."
"No," Touya whispers, and takes the knife gently out of Shindou's hand.
There's an argument. Of course there is. But when the lights from the squad cars start flashing across the warehouse floor it's Touya who's bathed scarlet in their light, two bodies on the floor and Shindou's knife full of Shouji's fingerprints.
He's done enough things tonight he would have sworn a year ago he'd never do. He can do his job for a few more hours before he goes home and tries not to think about what Shindou didn't say.
He's still Akira Touya, and he can at least do that.
I posted Arcadia!Isumi over on my personal DW, and
lindensphinx was like "Are you ever going to finish that two-parter?" and I was like "...Wait. I didn't?"I didn't. My bad - I totally was convinced that I had not only finished it but posted it. At any rate, here it is.
The sergeant is hanging half in Touya's office doorway, face lit with feral excitement, and the only thing Touya can liken this moment to is the first seconds of a gunshot wound.
No, he thinks, no, and tells himself afterward that he meant it wouldn't be that easy.
"We've got him," the sergeant says again.
Touya stands, reaching for his keys, already measuring the steps between his desk and his car. "I'm on my way."
By the time he reaches Akihabara, driving much faster than is safe with his vision full of the strobing lights of the patrol cars running silent in front of him, that initial reaction has grown to a gut-level certainty: something is wrong. This isn't one of those apparently-disastrous moves Shindou makes that turns into an insurmountable challenge thirty hands later; this is someone else's game, again, and Touya can't quite put his finger on how he knows. Not because Shindou wouldn't pick up a woman in a bar, take her out, and kill her – of course he would, he's Shindou, he does that sort of thing. But the setup, the first hands after staking territory, they're all wrong.
I won, Touya reminded him, weeks ago.
Yeah, yeah, you don't play fair, Shindou muttered, disgruntled. But he reached for Touya's hand anyway, laying absent kisses along the pads of Touya's fingers as he thought. Okay, here's one. If she leaves my sight after the first time I talk to her, even just to go to the bathroom, she's safe. I don't know what she's doing, y'know? She could be calling somebody, friends or her mom, sending them a picture of me on her cell phone or something. Girls nowadays, they're so paranoid.
An anonymous tip, and who would have made it, and when? Shindou's good; he doesn't brag, doesn't threaten, doesn't decompensate, doesn't give people the creeps. The dispatcher said it was a woman's voice. His victims never see him coming.
Someone else's moves. Someone else's game; but Shindou is playing it too, and Shindou plays against Touya, always.
Touya shears around a corner, down a dark street, leaving the convoy of patrol cars behind. He knows where he'd take a victim from that bar, if he were Shindou, if it's Shindou at the bar at all. There are a handful of warehouses in a line by the docks, mostly empty, free of nocturnal activity because they're rumored to belong to the Yakuza; Touya knows that to be true, but Shindou knows them to be empty and isolated, and if he's here with a victim, he'll want space to maneuver. He's never liked being confined, never liked the tiny, delicate waltzes in corners for a single flawless point that some players delight in. Shindou flings stones over the whole board at once like he was scattering rice grains for an offering and it's anyone's guess where the next battle will be. He kills the same way, leaving crime scenes that are some of the largest Touya has ever seen. If he's not in those warehouses somewhere, then he's not here tonight at all, and Touya can go home and pretend he isn't waiting for the phone to ring.
In the end, Touya very nearly misses it. There's a silver sports car parked behind a dumpster to the side of an old clothing import warehouse; if he hadn't glanced that way at just the right moment to see the streetlights reflecting where they shouldn't, he wouldn't have seen it at all. His first instinct is to whip around and into the gravel lot, but Shindou will hear, and there will be a dead girl and a pissed-off serial killer waiting for Touya on the warehouse floor. Cursing between his teeth, Touya drives farther along the docks before he turns around; cuts his lights two blocks away, cuts the engine at one block and coasts, gliding to a silent halt in the shadows of another building.
Unnerved, he pulls out his gun and gets out, surveying the warehouse for the best angle of approach. The ground is unstable under him. If that's Shindou in there, there's no telling how long he's been there or whether he's killed the girl already – or who made that call, which of all things is the question Touya really wants an answer to. If it was her, if Shindou made someone that nervous, it means he's starting to decompensate at long last; but if it was, why would she be here with him? And if it was someone else, why not warn her before she left a bar with a man who tears women apart with a piano wire and a long-bladed knife?
Why not call the police back to tell them Shindou was gone?
Touya eases his hand through a broken window to unlock a side door, and can't decide whether to laugh or shoot himself; because what he really wants is to talk it over with Shindou, to sit down and replay moves with him until they've figured out what it all means.
"I know, but I set up here all the time," Shindou's voice floats to him, drifting on air currents that break on the concrete walls around Touya and make it impossible to tell exactly where Shindou is. Touya moves carefully forward, sweeping his foot in front of him before he takes a step; Shindou has ears like a fox, and it will only take one shard of breaking glass for him to realize someone else is in the warehouse.
There's a girl's voice, giggly and tipsy. Touya can't quite locate her either, and so he ignores her altogether.
"It's the whole urban decay thing," Shindou says, his voice dark and silky in a way Touya has never heard. "Magazines go nuts over it."
Touya's in a dark hallway, following the distant sheen of moonlight with dust clouding around his feet and creeping into his lungs. He thinks he's going to come out onto the main warehouse floor soon. The safety has been off his gun since before he came into the building.
"You should do a shoot for me," Shindou says as though the idea has just occurred to him. "The whole Neo-Visual Kei thing, y'know, it's beautiful right now, really reaching its peak."
Shindou's victims don't conform to any particular type, which is part of what's made him so difficult to catch; but if Touya has gleaned any sort of pattern from them, it's that Visual Kei reminds Shindou of something he'd rather tear out someone else's eyes than be reminded of. If he'd gotten to this girl before Touya found them he'd have ripped her apart like a one-man wolf pack and left her insides unraveled on the warehouse floor. Touya's going to save her life if he can, but he'll at least save her from that. He moves faster, praying for luck and a clear floor in front of him.
Not too far away, Shindou gives a dreamy, pleased hum. "Yeah, I bet you could," he purrs. "Let me see. Right, just… let me look at you in the light. Stay there, let me see what you and the setting have to say to each other, 'kay? Move your head, just a little, just… like this…"
Touya steps out into the main warehouse, still in shadow. Shindou is standing in the moonlight, behind a girl a head and a half smaller than he is despite the bright plumage of her hair; his head is tilted, his body liquid with the pleasure of anticipation, and right now there's nothing human in the cold depths of his eyes.
He's behind her, close enough that his breath is stirring her hair, one hand on her neck, fingertips encased in smooth leather sitting lightly on her chin. A blade slides silently out of his other sleeve and into his fingers like a rattlesnake in a Pentecostal preacher's hands, glinting in the moonlight. Unrealizing, the girl laughs and strikes a pose, hips angled seductively back into the planes of Shindou's body.
Touya puts a bullet into the pillar behind Shindou, spraying him and the girl with shattering cement.
The sound of the gun is deafening in the hard space and Touya is the only one who's ready for it. Shindou's fast, but Touya is faster; he reaches the girl first and yanks her away, shoving her behind him and putting distance between the two of them and Shindou. She's keening with terror, scrambling away from both of them, and Shindou is furious.
"Police," Touya snaps at her. "You need to stay back behind me. Do you have a cell phone?"
"What's happening?" she screams.
"Take your phone, go into the hallway, and call the police –"
"You said you were the police!"
"Yeah, Touya," Shindou says, lazily malevolent, spinning the knife in his fingers with unnerving skill. "Aren't you the police? I'm just asking, y'know, because I thought a cop would have called for backup before he came in here."
"You had a victim in here who might still be alive, Shindou. There wasn't time."
"Not time to make a radio call?" Shindou takes a slow step forward.
"Look," Touya snaps back at the girl. "Believe I'm a police officer or don't. Either way, the guy you came here with just pulled a commando knife on you so I think it's safe to say that if anyone's trustworthy here it's not him. Take out your phone, call 110, and run!"
"Not cool, Touya, I was just about to head into yose," Shindou says, moving another couple of steps forward. Touya takes a step back, checking in his peripheral vision to make sure the girl is out of Shindou's reach. "Tell you what. Walk away. I'll give her a two-minute head start, swear to god. Not like she's gonna get far in those shoes, huh?"
"What's in this for me?" Touya asks bluntly. "Or her, for that matter?"
"Nothing's in it for you, Touya, I'm not feeling too charitable toward you right now so this is the best you're going to get. You walk away, I'll hide my eyes and count to a hundred while Alice Nine there runs for it, and if you're both lucky she might get away." The tiny curl of Shindou's lip suggests that he's about as optimistic about that outcome as Touya is. "Either way, whoever I kill next, her or someone else, I'll make it quick. She won't suffer, I promise. You keep trying to block my connection, though, and so help me the next one I kill, I'm going to keep her alive for hours, just cutting pieces off one after the other –"
"Shindou," Touya says, trying to push his gorge back down by sheer willpower. "Your problem is with me right now. Let's settle it between the two of us. Don't be a coward; play me on the goban I'm sitting at."
Shindou's head jerks in that convulsive glance back over his shoulder; he's pissed off and now he's upset, and Touya doesn't want the sudden realization that he's not the only one in this room trapped halfway between his lover and his opponent.
"Don't," he says quietly. "Shindou. He's gone and I'm here."
"You sure about that?" Shindou whispers, tilting his head a little so his eyes are shadowed from the moonlight by the bright fall of his hair.
"Maybe I don't want to be sure of it," Touya says. "Maybe there are some things I want him to know. Maybe I want to be the one who tells him."
"Tells him what?"
"That in the end, he wasn't good enough," Touya says.
It's a toss-up as to which is a greater shock: the gunshot that nearly deafens him or the way the girl's head explodes into the space between them, blood and brain matter and sharp skull fragments splashing across the floor.
Shindou freezes, wide-eyed. Almost on instinct, Touya lunges forward and takes him down to the ground, hands tight on his own gun and Shindou's knife to keep them out of the way as he rolls the two of them back into the dark where the moonlight doesn't reach. The warehouse is empty, no boxes to give them cover; so he shoves Shindou down onto the floor in the shadows and stands in front of him, gun trained back along the trajectory of the shot that killed the girl. "Drop your weapon and come out," he orders.
"You expect that to work?" Shindou snarks from somewhere around Touya's knees.
"You'd be surprised," Touya says between his teeth. "Shut up and stay down."
"You know, it'll be really interesting if he listens to you," says a voice out of the darkness across the warehouse floor.
In his entire career, Touya has only actually shot his gun a handful of times before. He's never shot to kill. Intellectually, in theory, he doesn't want to start tonight. "Identify yourself."
For long seconds there's silence. Then, finally: "That kind of hurt my feelings, Touya-san. I mean, I know you can't take time off from your busy schedule of obsessing over Shindou to notice the people around you, but I've been helping out on this case for six months. I've read all your notes. I've seen all the case files. I even know the number of your private Shindou hotline."
Touya's eyes widen in realization; Shindou pokes him lightly in the knee, clearly thinking along the same lines.
"I got you a birthday present," the newcomer says in a fair imitation of Shindou's voice. "I guess you could say I made it for you."
Strangely enough, it's the imitation that brings a name and face swimming out of Touya's memory. "He's a patrolman," he whispers to Shindou. "His name is Shouji."
Shouji, who had followed Touya like a puppy around the copycat kill site, getting more and more sullen as Touya listed the reasons the kill couldn't be Shindou's.
"He's a cop?" Shindou hisses. "God, Touya, don't you guys screen your applicants?"
"Shut up," Touya whispers back, and moves a step away. "Shouji, what are you doing? You didn't have to kill that girl."
"She found her cell phone," Shouji explains. The sound of his voice is moving in the dark, circling the floor in Touya's direction. Touya moves along the wall toward him, silent and hopefully unnoticed. "I couldn't let her call the cops, could I? C'mon, none of us wants that."
"You killed that other girl and tried to make Touya think it was me," Shindou says; Shouji isn't forgiven for that, and never will be, for however many swift-flowing minutes remain of his life. "That was stupid. Touya knows how I work."
Shindou's standing now, and moving, Touya can tell from the sound of his voice. Gritting his teeth, Touya actually finds himself debating whether he has time to find Shindou and hit him over the head, because an unconscious Shindou generally does more or less as he's told.
"So do I," Shouji says. "I said I'd read all the case files. You're fucking brilliant. That girl in Kyoto, two years ago? What you did with her eyes? I had that photo as my desktop wallpaper for six months. I thought there was no one better than you… until I tried to go up against Touya myself and he shut me down right there at the crime scene."
"He's not with you," Shindou whispers. Touya can't place him now; he and Shouji are both lost in the shadows and the dust glimmering in the moonlight. Touya keeps moving and prays he finds one or the other of them before they find each other. "I thought for a while he was, but he'd never have settled for this. He was kind of a bitch about not wanting any other gods before him, y'know?"
"Shindou, there are nine rounds left in that gun. Be quiet," Touya snaps. "Shouji, what are you trying to accomplish right now?"
"I could learn to play Go, you know," Shouji says quietly. "I've been sort of teaching myself, but I could get better. I wanted Shindou dead and I wanted you to never know the difference. Like… like people used to think that if you killed an enemy and ate their eyes and their brain all their powers would pass to you. I could be him, and you could play me instead, nobody would have to know the difference but us."
"You little bitch," Shindou says. "My kills are mine. Touya is mine. You're not eating any goddamn part of my body, metaphorically or otherwise."
"If you meet the Buddha on the road," Shouji says, and fires.
Touya's gun swings toward the muzzle flare, and he realizes with five pounds of pull on the trigger that he can't shoot not knowing where Shindou is. He fires low instead, sparking up hard concrete shrapnel from the floor at Shouji's feet. Shouji gives a shout, stung and surprised, and the next thing Touya sees is two bodies, a knife, and a gun tumbling over each other into the moonlight. He can't get a clear shot, but it doesn't matter – they're apart in seconds, scrambling to their feet. Shouji levels his gun at Shindou and looks toward Touya, who steps out into the light with his gun pointed at Shouji's head. Shindou is twirling the knife in his fingers, inching closer to Shouji; Touya moves a little to the side, angling so that Shouji can't quite see both of them at once.
Shouji is wearing a red shirt with a bright 5 blazoned on it and black skater shorts; the same clothes, or nearly the same, as Shindou was wearing in the one surveillance photo the police have been able to find. The front of his hair isn't bleached, not yet. Touya wonders if he's saving it, one last reward to complete his transformation.
"Say the word," Shouji says to Touya. "I'll blow his brains out. You want that, don't you? Him dead, I mean. He's a monster, right?"
"I want him in prison," Touya says, and doesn't even care if it's the truth or not anymore. If Shouji believes it, it might buy Shindou his life, and that's all Touya cares about right now. Everything else can wait.
"I want you dead," Shindou says. "I bet I outrank you."
"Shindou," Touya says.
"You owe me one, Touya," Shindou says in a surrealistically reasonable tone of voice. "I didn't kill that Ochi guy, not yet. Besides, c'mon, what else are you going to do with him? Let him sit in an interrogation room and tell your supervisors all about how you got between me and his gun?"
Touya has been trying not to think about that. He thinks about it now, knowing that the best thing to do – the only thing to do, his duty both technically and morally – is to shoot both of them and see if he can save Shindou from bleeding out onto the warehouse floor before the paramedics get here. Save him for trial and prison, buried under tons of concrete isolation for the rest of his life, fangs drawn until he learns how to use new weapons.
"There are no surveillance cameras here," he says finally. He's smart and resourceful, and later he'll find a way to have this mean something other than compromising himself beyond repair. "It would be my word against his."
Shindou sidesteps, trying to circle Shouji so that his back is to one or the other of them. Shouji steps back instead, keeping both of them in his peripheral vision, gun still trained on Shindou. Touya wonders what he's looking for, that he doesn't just shoot.
"Shouji, listen to me," he says. "The game is over, but I can still save your life. Put the gun down and move away from Shindou."
"You sure you want to do that?" Shindou asks Shouji. "Touya's all alone with two serial killers and no backup. The only reason either of us is still standing is that Touya's That Guy and he wants us to go to prison instead of getting shot like dogs. You walk right up to him like that and it would take a better man than Touya not to be tempted to get one of us out of the way and even the odds."
"Shindou, shut up!" Touya snaps, circling so that Shouji is between them again.
Shouji moves back another step and swings the gun around so it's pointing at Touya. "So what are you saying, that I should kill him instead?"
"You kill him," Shindou says, very quietly, "and you have no fucking idea how slow you're going to die or how long you're going to beg for it."
"Put the gun down, Shouji," Touya says.
Shouji swings the gun back to Shindou. "You should want him dead," he tells Touya. "Whether I'm alive or not, you should want him dead. Why don't you just shoot him?"
"Why don't you?" Shindou snaps.
"Because he knows," Touya says, realization churning slow and sickening in his gut. Shindou and Shouji both turn to look at him, cold eyes narrowed in the dim light. "He knows if he kills you there'll be nothing stopping me from gunning him down, and I think in spite of everything he wants to live. Right, Shouji?"
"Why?" Shouji grates.
"Because his Go is the most beautiful thing I know," Touya says, taking a step closer. "And you don't play."
Shouji turns instinctively, a little too far. Before he can correct himself, Shindou is moving; and before Touya can do anything, say anything, Shouji is nearly lifted off his feet by the force of the stab wound in his back. The gun in his hand swings around and goes off, sending a bullet whistling by Touya's ear close enough to ruffle his hair; Touya ducks, rolls, and comes up with a punch that knocks Shindou off his feet. Shouji drops like a rock, and Touya kicks the gun out of his hand, into the dark.
It's too late. He knows that even without turning Shouji over; Shindou knows his business too well, and the dark pool under Shouji is spreading too fast. He tries anyway, turning Shouji onto his stomach and putting compression on the wound as best he can. "I'm calling for backup," he says. "Hold on."
Shouji chokes out a bitter laugh.
"Akira," Shindou says, not unkindly. "He's as good as dead already. C'mon, you would have wound up shooting him anyway and you know it. He wasn't gonna just hand over his gun and get in the back of the squad car."
Touya rubs the back of his hand across his forehead, hearing the sharp edge of hysteria in his own laugh. "Fuck you, Shindou. I could have –"
"Could have what?" Shindou asks simply.
The pool is still spreading, soaking into the knees of Touya's pants. He thinks Shouji might already be dead; he doesn't bother checking. Shindou is right… about too many things.
"He figured it out," he says. "Next time it could be someone else, someone who's not a serial killer. What then?"
Shindou stretches out a hand and pulls Touya to him, out of the pool of blood. Settling in beside him, Shindou leans his forehead against Touya's. "Shh. We're careful," he whispers. "We've been careful since the first time I called and asked you to play Go with me. I think Shouji only figured out part of it, anyway. Not this, not us."
Touya leans into the touch of Shindou's hand against his face. He's shaking, he notices absently, and so very tired. "And when someone does?"
Shindou kisses him, soft press of mouth on mouth, careful in this as well. "I've got plans for that day too," he breathes.
"What plans?"
"Trust me," Shindou says. "I l… I'll let you in on them some other time. Okay? Go home. I'll clean up here."
"No," Touya whispers, and takes the knife gently out of Shindou's hand.
There's an argument. Of course there is. But when the lights from the squad cars start flashing across the warehouse floor it's Touya who's bathed scarlet in their light, two bodies on the floor and Shindou's knife full of Shouji's fingerprints.
He's done enough things tonight he would have sworn a year ago he'd never do. He can do his job for a few more hours before he goes home and tries not to think about what Shindou didn't say.
He's still Akira Touya, and he can at least do that.
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Honestly, this entire universe -- it's the best bits of Hikago combined with judicious salting of Hannibal Lecter. Only judicious, because Shindou isn't trying to remake Touya in his image -- he's remaking him anyway, but it's not conscious and deliberate -- and also I trust you that there won't be any stupid leaving Touya by the lake moments. (Sorry, didn't mean to get my HANNIBAL movie bitterness in your Hikago AU, there...)
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Glad you liked it - thanks!
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