Arcadia fic, Shindou/Touya, NC-17

[mirabella]

It's going to give Touya an ulcer, trying to keep straight the information he can share, the information only he can use, the information even - especially - he can't use.

Shindou was in America for six months and then traveled across Europe for another six. That he can tell his audience in briefings, because it's all in an Interpol report that traces Shindou's kills like zoologists tracking a rogue lion. He tells them some of what he's learned from Shindou's Go, that he's a risk-taker, that he lures his opponents into overreaching themselves, that he's most dangerous when you think he's just made a fatal error. He tells them that Shindou does exhibit some signs of paranoid schizophrenia, but if he has it then he's the most organized paranoid schizophrenic Touya has ever seen or heard of, and it's a mistake to think that Shindou's going to decompensate and make things easy for them.

He doesn't tell them who Sai is. His colleagues would want to know how he knows, and he can't tell them that Shindou whispered the story into his hair in the dark. He doesn't tell them that Shindou is a surprisingly skilled but thoroughly unnerving lover, that he watches his partners closely and is careful not to make any sudden moves, deliberately nonthreatening, as if most of his human interaction consisted of controlling people who were about to panic at any moment. He doesn't tell them where Shindou likes to be touched, how he likes to be kissed, that he has the kanji for death and impermanence on his right hipbone.

He tells them all he can, all he thinks will help; and what he doesn't think will help, he keeps to himself. At this point, Touya just hopes he has enough judgment left to tell the difference.

They find the girl's body. Shindou told him where it was, and Touya tells the rest of his team. He says Shindou called him, which is the truth, and doesn't tell them that in the morning there was a note on his pillow with directions to the body. Underneath the directions is a scrawled 3-4, which will not say I want to see you again to anyone but the two of them.

Touya explains away his lateness and his pallor by telling his team that he's coming down with something, and almost manages to go through the day without letting anything into his thoughts but a white, blind silence.



There are two more before Touya hears from Shindou again; two more dead girls with vacant eyes and bright, cheap clothes and Go stones slipped under their skin in familiar patterns. The second one has the opening moves of their unfinished game in her back. Touya can't tell if it's a taunt, a threat, or Shindou's strange way of showing affection, like a cat dropping a mutilated mouse at its owner's feet.

He can't sleep. He buries himself in Shindou's case file, goes over every word Shindou said that night a hundred times in his head, sits in front of his goban playing and replaying games, and doesn't look at the crime scene photos because he doesn't want to face the fact that he stood in front of their bodies with blood pooling at his feet and felt nothing but hot, sick jealousy.

When he finally makes himself look at them, he leans his head against a tumbler of scotch and traces with eyes and fingertips over everywhere Shindou's hands must have touched.



"Are you sorry?" Shindou asks as soon as Touya picks up the phone. His voice is hesitant, oddly muted; he sounds like a little boy afraid he's in trouble.

Touya sits down, shaking legs barely supporting him on the way down. "Shindou. You've been busy."

"Answer me, Touya."

Touya gives a dry laugh and rubs his hand over his eyes. "That's usually my line, isn't it?"

"I need to know. Just say yes or no."

"Don't make me answer that," Touya whispers.

There's silence on the other end of the line. Touya wishes he knew how to interpret it. This hesitance, this need, is a side of Shindou he hasn't seen before. He wishes he thought it would end well, with stammered admissions and therapy breakthroughs and Shindou being miraculously cured of whatever it is that has twisted him so, but he knows better. Shindou likes being the way he is. He likes killing.

He doesn't like being off-kilter.

Then Touya is on his feet, his tumbler spilling to the floor, and it is desperately important that he keep Shindou on the line. "Are you sorry?" he asks.

"We've been together for five years, Touya," Shindou says; which is correct, for some strange and twisted value of together. "When have you ever known me to be sorry about anything?"

That stings, unexpectedly fiercely – that Touya might be just another thing for Shindou not to be sorry for. He knows better, though. In Shindou Hikaru's entire life, only three things have held his attention for more than a few weeks – Go, murder, and Touya himself.

In the last five years, Shindou's Go, gifted as it was to begin with, has improved with every game they've played, just as Touya's has. Touya doesn't let himself think about what other skills Shindou has honed against him in that time.

"You're the only one of us who has a conscience, Touya," Shindou says, almost kindly. "And I've got nothing to lose."

"I didn't say you'd regret it on moral grounds," Touya says. "Tactical ones, maybe. Playing hane too soon."

"Touya. Are you accusing me of cockblocking?" Shindou asks, amused. "Yeah, okay, maybe you're right. I forgot how it roots you, having something that's yours that you don't want to give up. Your attack's constrained when you have to defend in one corner at the same time. Your attention's divided. Plus moves are just less fun if you have to make them, even if it's to kill a forming shape before it becomes a threat. If you wanted to make my life a little easier, we could write that corner off as a ten thousand year ko and leave it alone."

"I don't have any intention of making your life easier, Shindou," Touya tells him.

There's a brief, surprised silence before Shindou bursts out laughing. "That's my Touya. I've never seen you chicken out of a throw-in yet. And you want to win this one, don't you?"

"I do," Touya says. "I will."

"God, you turn me on," Shindou says, his voice suddenly quiet and almost wondering. "I don't think anyone ever has before, you know? Not like this. Not like how I want my mouth on your skin again because it tasted so good the first time, or how just thinking about you under me gets me hard."

Touya swallows hard and closes his eyes, struggling to keep his breath even and his mind on Shindou the case file. "I'm not going to have phone sex with you, Shindou," he says, and his voice comes out too quiet and too shaky.

"That isn't what I want."

"What do you want?"

"Aside from the usual?" Shindou's silent for a few seconds. Touya strains his ears into that silence, searching.

"I don't think I want to tell you yet," Shindou says finally, his voice oddly wistful. "Just… play with me. 5-5."

"3-4," Touya says quietly, closing the file folder over the crime scene photos.



It's nearly two in the morning when he finally hangs up the phone, pulls out the tape with shaking fingers, and sets it into a player hooked into his computer. He copies the audio onto his hard drive and cleans it as carefully as he can, making minute adjustments to the balance. When he's done, he fast-forwards and clicks "play."

"…make me answer that," his own voice says. Touya turns up the volume, watches the marker slide across the waveform, then stops, rewinds, plays it back again.

On the other end of the line, ferry bells clang in the distance, barely audible. It was 10:47 at the time. He hears them again at 11:15, and at 11:34, and then they stop.

Touya pulls up a search engine and tabs open every ferry schedule in Japan. Shindou is in Innoshima.



He doesn't arrange for backup, or even tell anyone where he's going. He tells himself it's because Shindou has a sixth sense for police movement second only to Jack the Ripper's, which is true; and that while Shindou would understand intellectually it would probably be the end of this strange rapport of theirs, which is also true. It's almost dark when he gets off the ferry, keeping to the crowd and blending in as best he can – Shindou has an unsettling habit of seeing Touya before Touya sees him. Following a gut instinct, he hails a cab and goes to Shuusaku's grave. Standing in front of it, he can hear the ferry bells dimly in the distance; he wonders if this is where Shindou called him from, if he played their game sitting on the bench in front of the tall marker.

Touya runs a hand over the grave marker and finds it as dry as the proverbial bone, no water-trails to disturb the thin layer of dust at its base. If Shindou has been here recently, he hasn't felt moved to be particularly respectful toward Shuusaku's spirit.



The girl in the shop is pretty and empty-headed, a little blowsy, and Touya is glad for her sake that Shindou has enough sense not to hunt in his own backyard. Her eyes widen in alarm when he pulls out his badge, but it's the reflexive alarm of someone who suddenly isn't sure she's paid her parking tickets, not the wariness of someone who legitimately has something to hide. It takes ten minutes and an extended consultation with what appears to be every female member of her extended family for four generations back to establish that Shindou was in the store the night before, and that when he left he got on the bus going west. Touya thanks her and goes back out into the dark.

Innoshima measures less than forty square kilometers – a nine by nine Go board, if one cares to look at it like that. Touya hasn't played on a board that small since he was three years old and the sensei in his Go class wouldn't let him play on a full-sized board on his first day, but he knows the theory: on a small board, play to the corners and the center will take care of itself. Shindou plays to the right first, invariably, whether for tactical reasons or simply because he's right-handed Touya doesn't know; that gives Touya a starting point, and after two hours and a dozen more conversations he finds what even the tourist pamphlets hadn't mentioned: a small and very old but tidy hotel tucked out of the way on a tree-filled street, where the owner, elderly and blithely trusting, confirms that Touya's cousin is indeed staying there.

"Thank you," Touya says. "I'm sorry to have missed him. I'll try again tomorrow. It's Room 14, isn't it?"

"No, no, Room 8," the owner says, and the policeman in Touya is momentarily torn between lecturing her about the error of her ways and being happy that she doesn't know any better.

Officially, lock-picking isn't taught in the police academy. Touya has the door to Room 8 open in less than a minute anyway and slips inside, his heart beating a little faster. For a minute he stands in the dark, letting his eyes get accustomed to it, listening to be sure that Shindou isn't there after all. When he's acclimated, he sections off the room into an imaginary grid and begins a quick but thorough search.

Shindou is that rarest of serial killers, clinically and legally sane but with no overt sexual component to his crimes. They wouldn't even know he was a non-secretor if he hadn't bitten one of his victims when she tried to jab at his throat and caught his mouth instead. The psychiatrists have had a field day with that for years, one increasingly baroque theory of sexual repression and sublimation after another, and have never taken well to Touya's suggestion that maybe Shindou kills women because women are easier to kill and he's never liked them very much. By the time Touya is done with his room, it's clear that he doesn't take trophies either, or doesn't keep them. The room is immaculate and holds nothing of interest but a backpack containing Shindou's clothes, a folding Go board, and recent editions of Weekly Go and Shounen Jump. Even the Western-style bed is blandly and tidily made, as if it had never been slept in at all. There's almost nothing Touya can get a hook into, nothing that tells him more about Shindou than he already knew; he can barely even feel Shindou's presence in this pin-neat room, and the frustration of it makes him grind his teeth.

The sound of a key in the lock startles him, but only for a moment, and by the time the door opens he's already out of sight of the doorway, half behind the curtains.

Shindou's humming something as he comes in and turns on the desk lamp, something slow and melancholy that sounds immeasurably old; Touya wonders where he learned it, if he learned it from his mother, from someone he loved in whatever strange way people like Shindou love. As Touya watches, his handcuffs and gun heavy weights in his jacket, Shindou sets a fast-food bag down on the desk and for a minute just looks at it, leaning on the desk with his back to Touya and his palms flat on the wood. Then he glances back over his shoulder with a jerky, uncomfortable movement, as if he knows there's nothing there but needs to see for sure.

Touya has only seconds left before Shindou realizes that there's someone else in the room, if he hasn't realized it already. This, this long stretch of moments, is the best opportunity that Touya will ever have to put a bullet through the skull of this luminous predator the way he would put down a rabid dog. He knows this as well as he knows that there are women who will live to see the new year if he does, and won't if he doesn't.

Touya doesn't believe in the Hand of God.

It should be easy. It is easy. But there are so many things he still doesn't know, so many things he needs to know, and it's just as easy to tell himself that the chance will come again. In the end, he can't decide if it's the things he doesn't know or the things he does that make him step out from behind the curtain and say, "Shindou."

Shindou moves reflexively and with frightening speed, but Touya is ready for him, and before Shindou gets anywhere near the door Touya has tackled him onto the bed and pinned him on his back with his wrists over his head and a hand clamped over his mouth.

"Quiet," Touya hisses into Shindou's ear. "It's me."

That probably shouldn't reassure Shindou, all things considered; but he stops struggling anyway, blinking up at Touya and looking simultaneously annoyed and impressed. He moves his head a little, and Touya takes his hand off Shindou's mouth.

"How the fuck did you find me?" Shindou demands.

"I do things like that. It's my job," Touya tells him.

"Smartass. What if I'd had a gun?"

"You'd still be flat on your back, because I caught you off-guard and your first instinct was to run. And where would you get a gun anyway?"

"Shut up with your Earth logic, Touya. I'll figure out how you found me, you know."

And he will, too. He'll figure it out and won't do it again, and that will make him that much harder to catch. Touya answers, "I know you will," and tries to feel nothing at all.

Shindou shifts a little under him, tentatively bringing his leg to rest against Touya's hip. "And then I'll find you again, and you'll come up with some other really impressive way to find me." He tilts his head up to nuzzle lightly against Touya's cheek, and Touya wonders absently when their faces got so close together. "How long are you giving me?"

His handcuffs are in his pocket. His gun is holstered against his ribs, a cold, uncomfortable weight. Shindou is quiet underneath him, looking up at him, grey-green eyes serene with faith and slow, simmering heat, and this is a piss-poor time for Touya to find that he's gotten out of the habit of being dutiful; an even worse time for him to remember what it is to want.

"Until morning," he murmurs against Shindou's mouth.

Shindou has killed two women in the last three months. I'm sorry, Touya whispers to their ghosts. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.



Touya hasn't spent much time thinking about other men's bodies; but Shindou's is beautiful, lithe and sleek, surprisingly flexible and unsurprisingly strong. Shindou straddles him, knees pressing into his hips, tugs his own shirt off and tosses it onto the floor before turning his attention to Touya's buttons. Touya runs his hands up Shindou's body, tracing light fingernails over his back, and loses himself in the taste of Shindou's throat.

"No one else ever gets to touch you like this again," Shindou whispers into Touya's ear, caressing the line of his jaw with soft, Go-calloused fingertips. "Whatever other cases you work, you'll always come back to me."

Touya spends a moment thinking about deals with the devil and the price for this that Touya himself will never pay; but it's a brief moment, because Shindou is kissing him, hot tongue sliding against his own, and the buttons of Shindou's jeans are cold and unwieldy under his fingers. His hand slips into Shindou's pants and closes around heat and hardness, and Shindou lets his head fall back, moves sinuously against Touya, and moans.

Shindou is what he is. His hand trails down over Touya's throat, thumb sliding slowly along the line of his windpipe to the notch at the base; he could probably kill Touya with one unexpected move, and he's getting off on that as much as he is on the slow stroke of Touya's hand on his cock. Touya knows the feeling. He always thought the best day of his life would be the day he put Shindou behind bars – but now he can't help wondering if it will pale in comparison to this, to this strange trust, to Shindou lulled into momentary docility by the touch of his hands. He wonders if his entire life will pale in comparison.

"You think too much," Shindou whispers, and kisses him again, hard and insistent.

He's right, so Touya tips them over, dumps Shindou onto his back on the uncomfortable hotel bed and crawls over him, pressing Shindou down into the mattress with hands and thighs and the weight of his mouth. Shindou twists underneath him, wriggling out of the rest of his clothes, fast but not fast enough; they're both panting suddenly, desperate, and all Touya can think is that they've been apart too long and right now he doesn't care how wrong that thought is. "I want to fuck you," he breathes into Shindou's mouth, and it isn't really a request.

For a moment, Shindou looks surprised and disconcerted. Touya expected that; saying that Shindou has control issues is a bit of an understatement. But it's just possible that Touya has a few of those himself, and after a long, uncertain moment Shindou nods.

Some other time he'll go slowly, prepare Shindou thoroughly, tease him until he wants it, but not this time. He can't. He's wanted this for too long. And Shindou likes the pain, maybe needs it, hisses between his teeth and digs his nails into Touya's shoulder and clamps his legs around Touya's back, arching up to meet him as if neither of them were bleeding. He's so tight, so beautiful, and Touya wants to tell him that but he doesn't have breath left for anything but pounding into him and the soft, sharp cries he can't hold back. His fingers leave bruises on Shindou's where they lace tightly together against the pillow, slippery with sweat, and when Shindou writhes under him and chokes out his name, Touya comes harder than he thought he could.

When he has his breath back, he slides down Shindou's body, lazy enough to take his time despite Shindou's impatient demands, and slides his tongue around Shindou's cock. Shindou's hands are tight and shaking in his hair but strangely careful, as if he doesn't want to hurt Touya but isn't quite sure how not to.

Touya shows him, and doesn't dwell on the tiny calluses on Shindou's hands where the piano wire rubs against his fingers through the gloves.



They play Go afterward on Shindou's small but good-quality fold-up board, Touya in a thin hotel robe, Shindou with the sheets draped haphazardly over his hips. It's a little surreal. Shindou's Go is crafty and unexpectedly brutal, even more unexpectedly peaceful in the strangest spots, nothing quite as logical as it should be. In the middle of the game, Touya looks at the board and remembers the beginning of a book read long ago in school: When I had journeyed half of our life's way I found myself lost in a dark wood. And he thinks: I'm only twenty-eight.

But even as he thinks it, he knows it doesn't matter. He could take the pro exam, could make Go his life, could make his father proud, but the truth is that Go without Shindou would only be a darker wood than the one he finds himself lost in now. Taking the pro exam is a pleasant dream, but as long as he would have to leave Shindou behind in the shadows, a passing fantasy is all it will ever be.

"We're good for each other," Shindou says, placing a stone. "You're a better agent than you were when we met. The next guy like me who comes along, you'll catch him that much faster than you would have. You'll save some lives that you wouldn't have otherwise."

Touya gives him a sharp look. "More lives than I'm sacrificing right now?"

Shindou smiles and says nothing.

Touya can imagine what Shindou feels when he kills, what he thinks, the anger that drives him to do it – he wouldn't be any good at his job if he couldn't – but it occurs to him that he has never before understood how it feels to hate as himself, on his own behalf. He knows now. He knows because he has never hated anyone, cannot even imagine hating anyone, the way he hates Sai for taking Shindou away from him before either of them even knew the other existed.



"It's morning," he whispers, pressing a kiss to Shindou's collarbone.

"Mm," Shindou murmurs sleepily, wrapping Touya more securely in his arms. "You should go before it gets any lighter."

"I…" Touya bites his lip and presses his forehead against the curve of Shindou's neck. "You know I have to –"

"I know," Shindou says.

There's a tone in his voice, barely audible, that's odd enough that Touya lifts himself on his elbow and frowns down at him. It sounds… patient, like a lion by a watering hole who knows that if he's still long enough the gazelles will come within reach; and whatever virtues Shindou Hikaru might possess, Touya has not been accustomed to thinking of patience as one of them.

Shindou smiles up at him. "Get dressed. Go make your call."

"You'll have minutes, Shindou."

"So I'll get dressed too."

There's a glint of challenge in his eyes now that makes Touya pull away and roll off the bed, grabbing for his clothes. Shindou is out of bed and pulling on his own clothes in a flash, slipping on his backpack just as Touya is yanking on his shoes. For a minute they stand there watching each other from opposite sides of the disheveled bed, breathing a little too quickly.

"You're going to lose," Touya tells him.

That strange patience flickers in Shindou's eyes for a moment before it's replaced by the sort of look that Touya was once used to seeing over the goban, before other children his age got tired of losing to him. "I don't think so, Touya. You don't read deeply enough, that's your problem."

"What the hell should I be reading?"

Shindou's grin is sudden and blindingly bright. "You're the brilliant big-shot agent. You figure it out."

"I will," Touya promises, and pulls his hand out of his pocket. His cell phone emits a nerve-jangling trill as he turns it on.

"I know where to find you. I'll always know where to find you," Shindou says, a promise or a threat; and then he's gone, the door slamming against the wall behind him.

Touya looks after him for longer than he wants to acknowledge before he calls the station to request backup, an agent team, and surveillance of every possible route off from Innoshima.



That night he has a dream in which he's deathly ill, burning with fever, and nearly frantic at the thought that he will die before he can warn someone about something; what, he doesn't know, only that it is more important than anything, more important than his own approaching death. When he coughs he deliberately sprays blood over the goban, the only warning he can think of, and then leans his head against the cool kaya wood and thinks Please, please, let the next boy understand.

Laughter that isn't his echoes in his head, indulgent and terribly kind.