Archive of Our Own

His hands are warm, and his grip is tight.

Kudou reached for the wrist, but the enemy’s brother reached back in a way that made their hands catch instead.  His fingers wrapped firmly around the back of Kudou’s hand, soft fingertips sweeping over Kudou’s skin.  Palm to palm.

Kudou didn’t expect it.

Kudou expects everything.

That’s the only reason that any of them are still alive.

The brother looks like a sliver of light—like a wisp of cloud.  Not quite incorporeal, but insubstantial.  Small.  Cold.  Frail.  There’s something wrong with him—something wrong about him.  He looks at things for too long, too deeply, too thoughtfully.  He looks too long, and sees too much, and you look back.

The enemy has a sick quicksand charisma—this is different.

But not too different.

It makes Kudou’s heart beat a fraction faster.  There aren’t any good signs these days.  He doesn’t believe in omens, but he sure as hell believes in instincts.

After they haul the hood off, the brother blinks around the bunker’s makeshift medical facility, and then down at the chair they dropped him in.  He clasps his hands, crosses his ankles, and shakes his head just enough to make his pale hair ripple and resettle.  It looks soft. 

Kudou folds his arms, plants his feet, and waits.

The brother blinks at him, next, but the startlingly bright green eyes don’t flick up and down like they’re gathering information—they trail over every single detail slowly, meticulously, like he’s memorizing.  Like he’s absorbing.

He is, after all, the brother of the adversary.  He was born to take.

Kudou forces himself to look towards the doorway.  Bruce keeps the gun barrel pointed down.  He shrugs.  Asano is less diplomatic: he grimaces, takes a long drag off his cigarette, and then makes a throat-slitting gesture with it, smoke ghosting behind his hand.

The brother is like the inverse of a black hole—a silver well that draws you nearer and drags you in.  Uncomfortably enthralling.

There’s something wrong with him.

“I suppose I should thank you,” the brother says, “for saving me.”

Kudou looks at the pale folded hands.  They don’t move.  No part of him moves.

“We didn’t do it for you,” Kudou says.

If he’s too stupid to fill in the gap, he’ll be minimally useful, but Kudou plans for worst-case scenarios.  They don’t need him to be smart.  They just need him to be somewhere other than where he was.

The brother smiles.  It warms his eyes.  “All the better,” he says.  “I always liked the noble ones best.”

Kudou sets his jaw, but he can feel that his eyes narrowed, and that’s as good as asking aloud.

“In the stories,” the brother says, somewhere between obliging and earnest.  He leans forward in the chair, just slightly, and the smile brightens.  “In the comic books.  My brother always said that anyone who would sacrifice for an unknown is an imbecile, but I think there’s a vicious sort of kindness in choosing the good of strangers over yourself.  Is that what you’re doing?”

Kudou doesn’t know what they’re doing, some days, other than running.  Other than trying not to die.

He keeps his mouth shut.  He keeps watching.

The brother sits back.  He looks around himself more thoroughly this time, tipping his head, twisting around.  He smiles at Bruce in the doorway.  He smiles at Asano, who stays stone-faced and skeletally still.  He considers the jury-rigged medical equipment and the cracked tiles of the walls.  He looks down at the floor, tilts his head again, looks up at the ceiling, looks back at Kudou.

He smiles.

There’s something wrong with him.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“What difference does it make?” Kudou says.

“All the difference in the world,” the brother says.  “I’m Yoichi.”

Some people say the meta ability makes you—that it defines, or confines.  That the person grows within its parameters.

Kudou doesn’t have time to waste on philosophy, but he does think in gear shifts—in jolts, and in sequences, and sometimes all at once.  Sometimes very slowly and then shudderingly fast.

They sit Yoichi at the far end of the table.  Most of the crew won’t get anywhere near him—they grab their food, glaring, and scuttle away down the halls to other places.

Kudou doesn’t blame them.  He didn’t know until tonight that he had enough curiosity left for it to get the better of him.  He’s learning a lot of things, all of a sudden.

He should probably be scared.

They should all probably be scared.

Bruce looks at Kudou.  Then he looks at Asano, who is, at best, one poorly-timed comment away from following the rest of the group and slamming the door on his way out.  Then Bruce looks at Yoichi.

The Devil’s twin.

Isn’t that right?

That was what they went in there for.

Bruce turns towards Kudou again.  “Oda made it back without being seen.”

As far as she knows.

“The bridge is still out,” Bruce says.  “Guess the one thing he can’t handle is infrastructure projects.”

Yoichi looks up from picking up individual grains of rice with his chopsticks and stacking them into an orderly pile.  “The Kasai Bridge?”

Bruce pauses.  He glances at Kudou.  He glances back at Yoichi.  “Yeah.”

Yoichi smiles.

Asano eyes him, then looks to Bruce, and then to Kudou.  “We still haven’t gotten any kind of an answer.  Can’t say I blame ’em.  I wouldn’t trust a ‘Let’s work together’ message on a bridge I’d wrecked, either, even if I was stupid enough to go back to the scene of the crime.”

“Oh,” Yoichi says, eyes going very round and very wide before the smile creeps back.  “Well.  In a way, you did.  Get an answer, I mean.”

They all stare at him, for a change.  Somewhere down the hall, someone raises their voice and then lowers it again, but the echo makes the words indistinguishable.

“Kasai Bridge,” Yoichi says, blinking at them.  “Right?”  At Bruce’s nod, the smile tilts faintly bitter.  “That was me.”

Silence.

And then Asano drops his chopsticks.

“Prove it,” Kudou says.

Yoichi wrinkles his nose and then gently sets his chopsticks down on the table to free both hands for gesturing avidly, drawing out a diagram in the air.

“I heard he was planning a march,” he says, “and I thought—I mean, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I thought—surely removing a thoroughfare and incapacitating some of his vehicles would at least slow him down.  I spent a long time trying to research how to run the charges, which… he’s…” The bright green eyes dull, and go distant, and the smile dies.  “He… knows things.  He finds things.  He’s very good at finding things.  And people.”

They know.

Yoichi takes a breath, squares his shoulders, and sketches out the bridge in the emptiness in front of him.  “I—anyway.  It seemed somewhat obvious architecturally that the load-bearing pillars were this one—” He points to one part of the imaginary structure suspended between his hands.  “And this one.  But I’d never made an explosive before, and of course I couldn’t test them, so… so I suppose I’m lucky one worked at all.  But I was hoping to sink the whole thing into the river, all at once.  Not just tear one side out.”  He sighs, wistfully, and smiles again.  “I hope it helped.”

Silence.  Yoichi looks between Bruce’s and Asano’s faces, studying them seriously.  The smile dwindles, and disappears.

When he turns to Kudou, Kudou looks him in the eyes.

“It did,” Kudou says.  “They spent hours looking for other charges and pulling people out of the water.  There are two tanks still in the river because they’re not worth trying to salvage.  We’d been planning to make a fast raid on one of the warehouses during the march, but the bridge dropping bought us so much time that we were practically able to empty the place.  More supplies than we’ve ever lifted in one go.”  He taps a fingertip on the edge of his bowl.  “That’s what you’re eating now.  Stuff we got from that raid.”

Yoichi’s eyes illuminate.

The smile sets them to gleaming.

“That makes it worth it,” he says.  “Oh, I was so—I thought—” He shakes his head.  It sends his hair fluttering everywhere.  “He realized, after that, that it was me.  I’d snarled up a couple other things for him, here and there, but never anything he could quite put his finger on, but then this—he was… That’s why he locked me up.  When your prized possession becomes a liability, you take it out of the display case and put it in a safe.”

Bruce’s eyes narrow.  “You’re not a possession.”

Yoichi turns the full force of that smile on him instead.  “Not anymore.  Thanks to you.”

Bruce shifts in his seat, glancing at Kudou.

“It wasn’t a charity project,” Kudou says again.  “It wasn’t for you.”

“I know,” Yoichi says, warmly.  “But you still spared me.  And you still saved me.  What difference does it make why you did it?  I’m grateful that you did.”

Grateful.  That’s something Kudou hasn’t heard, hasn’t felt, in a long time.

There are a lot of things he doesn’t feel.  There are a lot of things he can’t afford to.

“Fine,” Kudou says.  He shifts back, starts over, re-evaluates.  “The damage you did to the bridge—what else could you rig up like that?”

Yoichi blinks.  “I—oh.”  He waves his hands—like a pair of pale moths looking for the light.  “You’d be better off asking a demolitions expert.”

They don’t have a demolitions expert.  Hagino is dead.

“You’re it,” Kudou says.  “If we pick a target, can you—”

Yoichi’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes.  “Yes.  Anything.”

Anything.

No one offers anything unless they have nothing left to lose.

There’s a hatch in the ceiling of one of the hallways, with a square of grimy plexiglass open to the street above.  Hardly anyone ever walks on that street, but Kudou has always hated it—the prospect of being seen.  Peered down at by the very monsters you’re hiding from.  Pinned under the magnifying glass.

As they walk away from the mess hall to find Yoichi a room with a door that locks from the inside, they pass beneath it.  Kudou glances up, because he always glances up, because some part of him is always waiting to find someone looking back.

Just sky.

He keeps moving.

Yoichi, two steps behind him, stops and stares.

“Oh,” he says.  “Look.”

Kudou’s heart jackknifes up into the back of his throat, and his boots grind on the grating of the floor as he turns.  “What?”

Yoichi points up through the glass.  “The clouds are so…”

Is that code for something?

Kudou strides back to him, briskly enough that any normal person would back away.

Yoichi doesn’t move.

Kudou stares at him for a second.

And then looks up.

The clouds are stark pink and deep violet, streaked across the sky like smeared watercolors seeping outward, bleeding into one another slowly.

This close, he can hear Yoichi softly breathing out—just too quietly to call a sigh.

Kasai Bridge was almost two months ago.

And it sounds like he was living on a leash long before he was crammed into a cage.

Kudou looks at him again.  Too pale and too small and almost too slow to drag out of the pit of hell.  Too strange to be here, but he is.

“Come on,” Kudou says.

“Oh,” Yoichi says, instead of Why or Where.

He follows too close—Kudou almost clocks him with an elbow a few times as he leads the way to the narrow passage that connects to the basement of the apartment building.  When they reach the door, Kudou keys in the code without bothering to shield it from view with his other hand.

Yoichi had one betrayal in him—one cut in to the capacity of his heart.  One to use in this life.

And he spent it.

The first lock clicks, and Kudou pries the casing open.  He spins the dial to six, and then back to four, and then up to nine.  Another mechanism thunks into place, unbarring another layer.  He hauls on the deadbolt to slide it back.  He opens the door.

He steps through first and doesn’t beckon.  If Yoichi isn’t smart enough to follow, he’s going to have to learn quick.

Ten steps into the corridor—if it can be called as much when it makes mineshafts look like fine hotels—Yoichi hears the door slam behind them and glances back.

But he doesn’t stop.

He doesn’t ask.

He keeps following.

They reach the end of the jagged little passage, concrete dust clinging to their heels.  You wouldn’t be able to see it in Yoichi’s hair anyway—it’d blend in like snow.

Kudou listens at the interior door and then eases it open.  He peers around the edge of it and keeps his right hand on his pistol as he pushes it further open.  There are silencing meta abilities out there, and ones that make enemies invisible—a million different ways to disappear.

Clear so far.

Yoichi sidles through after him and looks around them at the cramped janitor closet they’ve emerged into.  He blinks up at the naked pipes on the ceiling, and then down at the bare concrete floor, and then at the door leading out.

Kudou takes that one first, too.

Yoichi just looks—at the low-ceilinged hallway, at the cracked plaster walls, at the faded signage pointing towards the staircase, at the scuffed elevator button that Kudou depresses with the heel of his hand.  The service elevator clunks and huffs and rattles its way down the shaft.

“Sixteen apartments,” Kudou says, keeping his voice too low to echo.  “Asano’s family owned the building.  A couple of people still live here.  They don’t know who they’re paying rent to.”

There’s a flicker of a smile in Yoichi’s voice, but Kudou doesn’t turn to verify it.  The shadows cast by the dying fluorescent bulbs will trick your eye if you’re not careful.

Kudou’s always careful.

“That’s a bit brilliant,” Yoichi says.

“I’d rather have a grocery store,” Kudou says.  He does glance over this time.  Yoichi isn’t fast, and he isn’t strong, but very little escapes him, and knee-jerk value judgment can’t be taught.  “You ever been dumpster diving?”

Yoichi blinks, head tipping to one side, and then his face resettles in recognition.  “Oh, you mean scavenging from the trash?  Yes, of course.  Not in a while, though.  Why?”

The elevator shudders to a stop.  The doors retract unevenly.

“My people don’t trust you,” Kudou says.  He steps in, makes a sharp turn to stand at the button panel.  Yoichi doesn’t wait—just follows him, closely, and watches as he hits the button for roof access.  “You’re going to have to earn your keep like everybody else.  I use people where they’re best suited.”

Yoichi continues to look around himself, more curious than concerned, as the elevator shivers, groans, and slowly starts to rise.

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Kudou says, because it’s the truth.

It might not matter what he knows.

He doesn’t seem to have a choice.

Yoichi smiles at him.  “That makes sense.  I guess I’ll have to change that.”

The smile doesn’t falter under the weight of Kudou’s stare while the rickety car lifts them two, three, four floors up.

“I thought you’d be like him,” Kudou says.

Yoichi’s smile tilts.  “So did he.”

The elevator vibrates violently before it stops.  Yoichi doesn’t react.  He has to have been in better elevators.  It must be because Kudou hasn’t shown any signs of distress about it, and he’s watching, still.  He’s taking cues.

The doors open.

It’s only one flight of stairs up to the roof, but Yoichi’s leaning on the railing by the time they reach the top, and there’s a wheeze pulling back on every breath.  He notices Kudou looking back at him and waves with the hand that isn’t gripping the railing, like he’s trying to ward off the attention, urging Kudou on without him.

They came up here for him.  There’s no point leaving him behind.

Kudou checks the interior video feed on the small, cracked screen.  The camera outside the door is dressed up to look broken and archaic, like it normally would be in a barely-maintained apartment complex from the times before.  It also streams back to their control room down below, but its view is focused on the area immediately around the door.  He could push Yoichi off the roof, and nobody would know.

He opens the door a crack and double-checks.  Nothing out of the ordinary out there—nothing at all except a crow perched at the corner, gazing down, ruffling its feathers when the door hinges creak.

Nothing in the sky.  Nothing on the other rooftops he can see from here.

That’ll have to be enough.

They’ll be taking another way back down, anyway.  He’s one of six people whose handprint the scanner outside, hidden under the fire exit sign, will accept, but Bruce will have locked all the downstairs doors behind them.  Just in case.

A little too close to Kudou’s elbow, Yoichi catches his breath, more or less.  He straightens up.

“Oh,” he says.  “Oh, look at it.”

Kudou stays within arm’s reach as he drifts towards the west-facing side of the roof like a sleepwalker.

Kudou half-expects him to try to climb the wall at the edge, but he just folds his arms on top of it and leans on them, white sleeves smearing through the grime.  The sunset stains his face and his pale hair stark pink, the shadows deepened into violet.

“We used to have a place,” Yoichi says.  “Years ago—when we were children.  Well—I suppose we never had it.  He stole it, somehow.  It was four floors up, and one of the walls was torn open.  You could watch the whole world go by.”

Maybe Yoichi was content just to watch it.  Maybe he always would have been.

Yoichi straightens up.  His fingers curl on the wall top, and then uncurl, and then curl again.  His eyes track over the jagged horizon—the skyline, the city, buildings and cranes and flagpoles all stretching upward from the Earth.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, voice hardly loud enough to carry over the wind.  “The world is beautiful.  And—people can be.  Sometimes.  Sometimes they are.”

The striations of the sky are striking—the dwindling sun burns deep gold just above the horizon, spearing shafts of amber light like the spokes of a wheel past clouds stained scarlet and pale pink and a kingly purple, their shadows melting into indigo.

Yoichi’s wrong.

People are wretched.

People are terrified.  They’ll sell their souls for anything that looks like safety.  They’ll grind up their integrity and blow on the dust for a single moment’s satisfaction.

Mostly.

Yoichi’s right, too.

Because some people are like Bruce.  Like Asano.  Like Oda.

Like Hagino, and Suzuki, and Masuda and Shimada and all the others who knew that Kudou would lead them into hell a hundred-thousand times, and didn’t blame him when he couldn’t lead them back out.

And some people are like Yoichi.

Waiting in the dark.

Looking up, looking right past the barrel of the gun, looking for the eyes.

And smiling, in the face of death.

Maybe he’s had a lot of practice.  Kudou doubts he’s ever seen much mercy, but he looked for it all the same.

“You wanted my name,” Kudou says.

Yoichi turns.  “Yes.”

“It’s Kudou,” he says.

Yoichi blinks.

And then smiles.

And then looks out at the horizon.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You’ll live longer,” Kudou says, “if you don’t confuse an ally with a friend.”

“You’ll live better,” Yoichi says, “if you do.”

Kudou looks at him.  He was a prisoner until about five hours ago—for how long, before then, is impossible to guess.

“You don’t know the first damn thing about living,” Kudou says.

“No,” Yoichi says, thoughtfully.  “I suppose not.”  He turns towards Kudou, and he smiles again.  “Might as well try to find out.  Don’t you think?”

Kudou eyes him.

The mistrust doesn’t deter him.  He wraps his arms around himself and stands very still, half-smiling, bathed in the rosy glow.

Kudou keeps his own arms folded—the left on top, with his fingers grazing the lever of the gauntlet.  He watches the sky, and the street, and the light fading on Yoichi’s sharp cheekbone.  No surprise he can barely run.  There’s no meat on him.

The clouds darken.  The sun shrivels to a pinprick, then one rippling line of light, and then recedes to nothing.  The night starts to swallow them.

“Come on,” Kudou says.

Yoichi glances towards the door they came from on the roof but doesn’t hesitate to follow Kudou away from it—towards the far corner, where the fire escape ladder extends just a few inches over the top of the wall.

Kudou goes first.

Yoichi’s careful to keep his steps quiet, gripping each rung with both hands before he eases one foot down to the next.  He’s panting by the time they make it to the bottom.

Kudou makes the surveillance sweep slightly slower than usual before gesturing to him to follow down the alley, around the unmarked twists and turns, staying close to the inner walls.  None of the quiet passersby on the streets, striding with their heads down and their collars up, even takes any notice of them.

He doesn’t need to count out the manhole covers anymore, but he does it out of habit.  The first four are welded shut from underneath.  The fifth is fixed to the street with specific bolts that are nearly impossible to remove without a custom tool.

He unzips the small pocket below the kevlar chest piece of his vest, takes his out, glances around them one more time, and kneels down.

“Oh,” Yoichi says, softly.

Kudou goes still.  Looks up. 

Yoichi points straight down the alley.  “Do you see that building?  The tall one, with the bright windows, with the satellite on top?”

Kudou sees it.  Kudou has seen every building in this city from almost every angle that there is, in his attempts to hunt the hunter.

It was an apt description of a good-sized high-rise about a block down past the canal.

“He keeps a lot of records there,” Yoichi says, slowly lowering his hand.  “Of… meta abilities, mostly.  Of people.  He remembers a lot, but he can’t remember them all.  He documents who owes him what—what he’s traded, what he’s done.  And the personnel, too—which of the government employees are his, and which are just too scared of him to do anything but go along with it.  He’s very… He likes to have things.  To be able to put his hands on the physical evidence of an intangible thing.  So he keeps track.”

Kudou watches Yoichi’s mouth twist, watches his shoulders rise and tighten and then settle, low and loose.

“The shift change,” Yoichi says, “is at six thirty right now—he sets it around sunrise, most of the year.  He wants to have control of the night, but he also wants to control a lot of people who work regular daytime hours.  So in practice… People are tired by the end of the night, and they start to slip away before they’re technically done.  But the next shift doesn’t want to get up so early, so they trickle in late.  Timed right, you could make your way in without too much interference, and set charges in a couple different places in the basement.  A fire would destroy anything that the collapse didn’t.”

Kudou opens the manhole cover, grips the edge, and heaves to wrench it aside.  It clanks loudly against the pavement.

Yoichi doesn’t startle at the noise.  He strides back over without a word—without a sound.

“Go,” Kudou says, watching the street.

Yoichi grips the top rung of the ladder below, places his feet, and carefully starts climbing.

Kudou climbs in after him and then drags the cover back over them, gritting his teeth against the strain of moving its weight from underneath.  Yoichi stops moving when the whole shaft goes pitch black.  Kudou feels for the holes and resecures the bolts before he trades the tool for a flashlight.

He clips it onto his belt.  It swings back and forth as he starts down, but it’s better than nothing.  Yoichi breathes out—one soft half-sigh—and goes back to descending.

“What do you need?” Kudou says.

Yoichi stops.  “What?”

“What do you need,” Kudou says, “for the explosives?”

Yoichi stays silent for a second.

Then he starts climbing again.

“I’ll make a list,” he says.

Kudou runs his fingertips over the lever on his right gauntlet—back and forth.  Back and forth.

The extraction team is closer than he’s comfortable with, but if they get separated—or if he gets killed—Yoichi can’t run very far.  Even the current distance from the target to the rendezvous site just beyond the bridge might be pushing their luck.

Luck.  That’s a laugh.

Kudou is carrying the charges in a backpack.  There’s a part of him that can’t help wondering if he’s wrong—if he was wrong from the beginning.  If he’s a sucker.  If this is a con.  If Yoichi is still on the demon’s side—a long game preying on their pity would be just his style.  One wrong step would reduce the so-called resistance’s so-called leader to a very small collection of smithereens.

At least a counteroffensive of that caliber would prove that the enemy was scared of them all along.

But the fact of the matter is that it took Yoichi an entire week to cobble the bombs together from the scraps that they scraped up.  He only would have had to send one signal, in all that time.  He only would have had to transmit one message, from within the mess of transistors and transmitters and antennae and wires and broken parts, and they would have been overrun.

And he’s staying close, now.  He’s close enough that they would blow up together.

It’s too early for even most real maintenance workers to be up and about, but any camera could be live.  They mostly take the rooftops and the alleyways and the little side-streets, flitting through the city like a pair of ghosts.

Kudou can see it again—the corner of the building.  It’s strange to imagine that tract of air being empty.  It’s strange to consider that that’s their goal.

He leads the way up the fire escape of the next building over—a row of shops with the windows boarded up.  It’s barely light enough to scope out the perimeter of the place.

The enemy gives nothing up easily—nothing for free.  If this is as valuable a target as Yoichi believes, Kudou knows to expect a fight.

Two sentries at the front doors, one at the back.  All of the window-shades on the lower floors are pulled shut.  Surveillance cameras posted on every corner of the roof, pointing down; half a dozen more clustered around the front entrance, and three at the back.

Kudou breathes out.  He runs his fingertips over the ammunition slot in the left gauntlet even though he knows he filled it, checked it, double-checked.

Six knives on each side.  Sixteen rounds in each of the pistols holstered from his shoulders, nestled against his ribs.  If they’re very lucky, he won’t have to make those count.

Kudou doesn’t plan for luck.

He packs the gauntlets carefully into the duffel bag and zips it up.  He threads his arms through the sleeves of the coveralls and buttons it up to his throat.  He scratches with his fingernail at a little bloodstain next to the embroidered patch on the front of the baseball cap.  It doesn’t come up, but most people would think that it was oil.

They climb back down to the street.  Kudou doesn’t have to speak—he barely has to gesture.  Yoichi goes still, blinking, and then waits while Kudou reaches out and adjusts his hat, tucking more of his pale hair underneath.  He looks drastically different without it draping in his face.  He said most of the people subject to his brother have never seen a trace of him, but when there’s no such thing as safe, there’s no such thing as too safe either.  Kudou nudges up the glasses that they put on him for good measure.  They make his eyes look impossibly bright.

Kudou starts talking, low-voiced, ten steps before they turn the corner.

“He’s no good for her,” he says.  “I keep telling her—girl like that?  She needs somebody stable.  He’s a deadbeat.  You remember what I was telling you last week, about how he was at that party?”

Yoichi makes a face, shakes his head.  “Yeah.  What a scumbag.  Can’t she just leave?”

Kudou should have figured.  Yoichi stayed alive in the heart of hell all this time.  “You know how it is.  She thinks it’ll get better.  She thinks she’s got nowhere else to go.”

The guard is eyeing them as they saunter up.  Kudou gives him a lazy salute, then pats at all the pockets of the coveralls until he hits the one with the folded paper in it.  He takes it out, unfolds it, and offers out the maintenance form—laboriously recreated to resemble the one they lifted off of the corpses.

Kudou knows it’s faultlessly convincing.  Asano has an eye for detail like no one else.

“HVAC,” Kudou says.  “You been inside yet today?”

The guard takes the sheet.  He scans it in sections, intermittently looking up at the two of them.  “No.”  He takes a packet of his own out of a pocket—folded into neater quarters, several pages thick.  He skims the topmost page and compares it with the imaginary work order in his other hand.  “You’re not on the schedule.”

Kudou looks at Yoichi.  Yoichi sighs, folds his arms, and elbows Kudou gently.

“Told you,” Yoichi says.

Kudou scowls at him and then forces a smile for the guard.  “Sorry.  Thought that might happen.”  He rubs at his head just below the band of the cap and shrugs.  “We got the call late last night, so we figured we could get it taken care of first thing before people start coming in to work, you know?  But nobody wants to reprint the schedule at two in the morning, right?”

Yoichi sighs again, pushing his glasses up with the back of his wrist.  “We can come back.  It’d probably be about ten or so.  We should be done at the bank by then.”

“Should be,” Kudou says.  He adjusts the strap of the duffel bag over his shoulder, smiling at the guard.  “It’s not life or death, man.  Just gonna be pretty damn chilly on the office floors.  You’ll get complaints, but nobody’ll get hurt.”  He pauses.  “Oh.  There is a fee—for our time getting over here, and all that.”  He turns to Yoichi.  “What is it, again?  They just changed it.”

Yoichi winces.  “For two of us?  Thirty grand.  I think.”

The guard stares at them for a second, then looks down at the work order again.  He rolls his eyes.

“Fine,” he says.

Kudou grins at him.  “Thanks, man.  Appreciate you.  We’ll make it quick.”

“You’d better,” the guard says.  He swipes his card at the reader and steps clear of the door.

Kudou offers another halfhearted salute.  Yoichi holds the door open for him.

It falls shut behind them, and the latch clicks.

Kudou leads the way down the stairs into the basement, moving as quickly as he dares with several bombs strapped to his back.

All the doors are helpfully labeled.  He eases the backpack and the duffel both down onto the floor to free his hands for picking the lock to the mechanical room.  Yoichi opens the backpack gingerly and starts arming the first one.

The lock gives.  It’s a fire door—heavy as hell, specifically designed to fall shut and stay that way and contain exactly this kind of disaster.

Yoichi picks up the first bomb.  It’s built into a plastic casing salvaged from an old space heater—about one and a half feet square.  He cradles it to his chest like a child and carries it over to the far corner of the room, where he arranges it carefully between some massive humming machinery and a broad metal pillar.

Kudou drags a filing cabinet over to prop open the door.

Yoichi comes back out and retrieves the second explosive, slightly smaller.  He waits for Kudou to pick up the backpack and then unfold the blueprint that they scrounged up from the city’s original permitting records.  Yoichi looks down at it again for several seconds even though Kudou suspects he’s memorized it by now.

Yoichi leads the way to the server room, which contains another structural support column, and then they deposit the last bomb in the far corner of the basement, creating a rough triangular configuration with the others.  Yoichi rests it against a section of load-bearing wall, and Kudou whips the blood-encrusted blanket out of his duffel bag and drapes it over the casing.  If someone comes across this before they get out onto the street, any rational person would hesitate to touch it.

Hesitation gets you killed.

Kudou opens the duffel bag, swaps one of the gauntlets over into the backpack, zips them both up again, and shoulders the backpack back on.

Yoichi blinks at him, eyes looking wider than ever behind the glasses even though the lenses don’t magnify at all.

A sliver of his hair slipped loose.

Kudou reaches out.  Yoichi swallows.  Kudou tucks it away again.

Then they take the stairs back up—slowly.  No sense tiring Yoichi, and hurrying would look suspicious.  The characters they’re playing have no reason to rush.

“And I keep telling her,” Kudou says as they top the stairs and approach the exit door again, “that if she’d just try, there’s probably, like, a hundred better guys that would throw themselves at her feet.  But she’s got this sunk-cost fallacy thing going with it now.”

“You can’t tell her,” Yoichi says.  “You have to help her see it for herself.”

The guard on the steps looks less than thrilled to see them.

“Hey!” Kudou says, brightly.  He points off in the direction they came from.  “Sorry, gotta get some parts from the truck.  This one’s a doozy.”  He flashes a grin.  “If we’re more than five minutes, send a search party, okay?”

The guy scowls.  “You said you’d be quick.”

Yoichi presses his palms together.  “You can’t rush art.”

Kudou extends both hands towards him—one still clenched around the handles of the duffel bag—to make a See? gesture.

He slaps Yoichi’s back gently with his free hand as they walk away.

Yoichi waits until they’ve nearly turned the corner before muttering, “You’re obnoxious.”

Kudou’s heart does something so stupid that he almost stumbles.  “Right back at you.”

Yoichi smiles.

That makes it worse.

They don’t have time for this.

Kudou claps Yoichi’s shoulder to guide him around the next corner.

“That was all right?” Yoichi asks, and the note of urgency in his voice—

It slips out.  “Perfect.”

Yoichi smiles thinly.  “I think that depends on the results.”

He’s right, obviously.

And the detonator doesn’t have all that much range—they can’t afford to move much further from the site.

Here is going to have to be good enough.

The building they just ducked around should shield them from the worst of the heat.  Kudou drops to one knee, ripping his coveralls back open.  He snatches the earplugs out of one of the pockets and holds them up while he unzips the backpack again.

Yoichi jams them into his ears.

Kudou lifts the small cardboard box out carefully and offers it up to him.  Yoichi takes it.  Kudou twists the second set of earplugs and crams them into his ears.  He puts his gauntlets back on, curls his fingers around the levers, breathes out, and lets go.  He looks up at Yoichi, who clutches the box in both hands and looks back down at him.

If it works, it works.

Either way, they run.

Yoichi opens the flaps of the box and lifts the detonator out.  He lets the box fall onto the crumpled duffel bag.

Yoichi takes a breath.  His eyes flick up to Kudou’s.  They linger, for a moment.

And then he looks down at the jury-rigged, jumbled-up device resting in the steady hands that made it.  He depresses the three switches, one by one.

One by one, the bare red LEDs above them flicker into life.

The charges are responding.

They’re armed.

Yoichi looks at Kudou again.

Kudou shifts his weight onto his back foot, resting on his knee.  He curls his hands around the levers, just too gently to fire.

He nods.

Yoichi presses his thumb down into the wide black button and flips the last switch.

Kudou doesn’t release the breath that he just drew.

His heart beats in his ears.  Yoichi keeps staring down at his fingers on the switch, and in the shadow of the bill of the baseball cap, his eyes are tight.  He looks exhausted.  He looks older than he should.  He’s beautiful like an ivy-strangled ruin in fading light.

Kudou hears it.

One blast, then two—over the rush of air and the roar of the concrete collapsing and the thunderclap of the sound barrier giving way, he can’t tell if the third charge blows too, but he has long since grown so intimately acquainted with destruction that he knows.

It’s enough.

The building’s coming down.

Back up on his feet—he grabs Yoichi’s hand in one of his and rips the earplugs out with the other.  He needs to be able to hear what the guards start shouting.

The shockwave slams into them like the fist of an angry god, ushering in a choking torrent of ashen dust.  The force of both together makes Yoichi stumble, hard enough that Kudou feels his balance tip.

Kudou expected that.

He already has his arm around Yoichi’s shoulders to grip his elbow and haul him back onto his feet.  His mouth wastes the breath before he can bite back the words.

“I’ve got you,” he says over the clanking of the shaking streetlights and the rattle of every windowpane.  “Come on.”

The map spreads in his mind.  A quarter-mile forward, then veer left to run parallel to the canal until they reach the rendezvous.  It’s less than a mile altogether, and they’ll duck and weave their way through it—they won’t run nonstop.

It wouldn’t matter if that was more efficient anyway.  He won’t leave Yoichi behind.

The blast would have incinerated the guards at the doors—knocked them all off their feet and unconscious with third-degree burns at best, if the building’s design swallowed the worst of the flame and the impact.  Not unlikely, given the seismic safety requirements on the permit that they pulled.

So it’s possible that word will travel faster than they can.

Kudou can already hear the constriction at the bottom of all of Yoichi’s breaths—the low, harsh wheeze as each one tries to snake its way in and out of him, and struggles to leave his lungs.

Fine.

If Kudou has to carry him, they’ll make it.

Running in the quiet always feels stiflingly intense—eerie, in the way that the silence presses down, but the hammering of your heels on the pavement disrupts the quiet, echoing like gunshots in the emptiness.  It feels like the whole world should hear you, and zero in.

It feels like you’re the only thing awake, so you’re the only target.

You’re not the only thing awake.

Over the rumbling and the distant screams, Kudou can just make out the jackboots pounding on the concrete not far behind.

Just one pair.

For now.

Kudou hauls Yoichi sideways into the first alleyway he sets eyes on, earning a yelp that barely even registers in his ears.  Yoichi’s ankles tangle again, but he weighs so little that Kudou keeps him upright.

Then Kudou shoves him down into the shadow of a pile of trash and presses himself back against the wall.

Must be a new guy.  The boots run right towards them without even slowing down.

“Government official!” their owner shouts.  “Hands up!”

Kudou steps into the mouth of the alley and raises both arms, gauntlets and all.

The guy’s eyes widen, and he whips his rifle up to aim.  “Drop the weapons!”

Kudou blinks, nice and slow.  “Weapons?”

The guy’s knuckles bleach where he’s gripping the barrel.  His trigger discipline sucks.  His hand is shaking.  “I said on the ground!”

“Hold on,” Kudou says, levelly.

The kid jerks the rifle barrel towards the gauntlets.  “Do it!”

“These aren’t weapons,” Kudou says.  “They’re braces.  For my arms.  Like crutches.”

The kid’s chest heaves.  He leans fractionally forward, squinting.  The barrel of the rifle wavers as he moves—sinking one inch, then two.

Kudou drops, all right.

He drops to the pavement and sweeps the kid’s ankles out from under him with one swift, sharp kick.

It flings the kid to the ground before he can gasp, and the ground smacks the breath out of his lungs.  He gapes like a beached fish, fumbling for the rifle that tumbled sideways when he fell.

Kudou stands up.  Stands over him.  Draws one of the pistols, flips the safety.

Should have kept the earplugs in.

The hands come up—pale palms, white flags.  “Please—”

Between the eyes.  Kudou hauls the bullet into a higher gear as soon as it leaves the barrel.  Make it quick.

Not for mercy—to shut him up.  To make his hands fall to the pavement instead of reaching for a radio.

Hagino died for mercy.  Kudou won’t.

The sick, definitive crunch of the bone splintering would be enough, but he risks waiting a few extra heartbeats to be sure.

The blood wells.  The eyes stare.  The ribcage stops rising.

Yoichi, scrambling up beside him, stops breathing, too.

“Move,” Kudou says.

Yoichi startles, but he doesn’t shift his weight.

Kudou grabs for his wrist, again—and again, instead, ends up with Yoichi’s slender hand clasped in his.

“Wait,” Yoichi says.

They can’t wait.  There’s no—

Yoichi snatches up the fallen rifle and slings the strap across his chest.

And they run.

They don’t get far.

Kudou knows the sound like the rasp of his own breath—hears it in his dreams, tracks it and flees it sleeping and waking.

“Down,” he hisses, more warning than command, because Yoichi won’t instinctively know how to respond the way the others do.

Yoichi’s head starts to turn towards the low buzz, his eyes widening.  Kudou hauls on his hand, whipping them both around the corner of some old brick building, and pulls him down into a crouch in the shadow of the wall.

The buzzing gets louder, harsher, shriller—an unremitting, rising whine, the call of a thirsty insect with no wingbeats and no self-interest.  The harbingers of the enemy’s will, and the extension of his endless eyes.

Kudou knows, at least, that he doesn’t have to say Don’t move.  Yoichi is extremely proficient at not moving.

The hum sharpens to a higher pitch that makes his skin prickle and his stomach turn.  It’s the sound of getting caught.  It’s the sound of getting killed.

He doesn’t hold his breath, but he lowers it, steadies it, thins it—minimizes the sound and the swell of it in his chest.  He grips Yoichi’s hand in his left and bends his right arm smoothly, angling the gauntlet skyward.  Slow.  Easy.  Stay calm.  Stay calm until you can’t.

Yoichi’s hand squeezes his, and Yoichi’s breath uncoils in his ear.

“Aim for the underside,” he whispers, so low that it’s barely distinguishable over the whine.

Kudou clenches his teeth to suppress the obvious response—You always, always aim for the camera, because if he knows where you are, you’re as good as dead.

Swallowing the snarl shakes his skull.

And his thoughts shift.

First gear, third gear, down to second, up again.

The copter drones are a relatively recent addition to the enemy’s arsenal.  They started turning up about two years ago—a trickle, at first, thickening slowly.

Then they brought a whole cell in Hokkaido to its knees.

And then they flooded the skies.

Sniping the camera eye from a distance is widely considered the best bet—they spin towards the shot, trying to pinpoint you blind so that they can transmit your coordinates before opening fire, and that buys you time to sever the propeller joint and send them crashing to the ground.  If they land somewhere soft enough, the wires are good, the motherboards are better, and the batteries are gold.

But Yoichi collapsed a major commuter bridge with a single homemade explosive that he somehow kept a secret from a monster with a hundred surveillance abilities.

He might be a mechanical genius.  He might have seen the schematics they used to build these things.  It might be both.

Kudou doesn’t let himself take a deep breath.

He keeps his eyes on the twisting triangle of refracted sunlight gleaming off of the sharp-edged, polished plastic just around the corner of the wall.

He tightens his grip on Yoichi’s hand.  Yoichi squeezes back.

There’s something wrong with him.

Something powerfully wrong.

The humming, agitated circle of the spinning blade peeks around the corner first.  Kudou hates how sentient they seem—hates the way their movements were specifically calibrated to imply emotion to an empathetic mind.  They’re built to make you hesitate.

And if you hesitate, you’re dead.

The drone swoops as it banks around the wall, the whirling blades slicing through the air.

The plastic gleams differently than it used to.

Because it’s not plastic.

It’s metal.

They caught on.  They’ve reinforced the camera casing and the underside.

Kudou’s blades won’t even nick that anymore without a concentrated assist from his meta ability, and even then—

Well.

That’s why he never puts all his ammunition in one basket.

The drone whirs out into the open, and he dives forward, rolling to the pavement as he levels the gun to greet it with a nine millimeter bullet precisely where Yoichi suggested—squarely underneath.

The metal crumples, shrieking as the momentum of the bullet shreds through, and sparks fountain upward from the exit hole on top.  The blades stutter, shudder, and stop spinning, and the whole thing lists to one side, then tips right out of the air.

Kudou turns.  Yoichi is already getting to his feet.

“There’ll be more,” Kudou says.

Yoichi doesn’t pause—just holds his hand out, scanning the sky.  “I know.”

Kudou takes it.

They make it almost two more blocks.

One drone is easy.  Kudou digs his heels in against the battered concrete, sights it, and fires.

Then there’s two.

He drags Yoichi into an alleyway before the overlapping buzzing draws close enough for the cameras to have picked them out.

It’s a detour, but an efficient one.  It won’t waste much of Yoichi’s limited energy.  Kudou has to believe it’s the right choice.  He can’t change it.

The drones tail them.

He whips Yoichi around another corner and crouches low, bracing the pistol as well as he can around the metal of the gauntlet.  No time to take the gauntlets off.  Not worth the risk if there was.

Both drones whisk around the corner at the same damn time.

He targets the one on the right—the one likelier to zip past him and punch a dozen bleeding holes through Yoichi’s skull before either of them—

Down it goes.

He swivels, hearing his heartbeat in his ears, forcing himself to stay calm enough to—

The second one drops before he can adjust his aim.

It takes him a second that they don’t have to process the deafening gunshot from behind himself.

And then the faint noise of dismay that Yoichi makes as the recoil sends him tumbling to the pavement.

Kudou stares at him for a second.  He fumbles to reposition the rifle in his haste to scramble back up.  Kudou is upright first, reaching for him—and the relief in Yoichi’s eyes as he grabs on is too much to consider, now.

First they have to survive.

It flicks into Kudou’s mind that Yoichi must have practiced that, too, while his brother’s back was turned.  He must have scrounged for knowledge like a scavenger, clawing for scraps that might bolster a freedom he wasn’t guaranteed.

And this is the salvation Kudou gave him: running in the streets, hunted like an animal, as the city comes awake.

At least the explosion and the gunfire will keep ordinary people indoors.  They know this story by now.

The way that the sirens echo around the structures and through the streets makes the vehicles producing them impossible to track.  Kudou and Yoichi have to stay low, have to travel without a trace, have to disappear before they’ve ever appeared at all.

Yoichi follows silent directions like a dream, but Kudou can hear the scrape of his breathing getting louder with every single block.

He can hear the buzzing getting louder, too.

They slip around the back side of an elementary school and come up on a chain-link fence—one that wasn’t there two weeks ago, the last time Kudou walked through the streets with his head down and made annotations on the map.

Nine steel insects hover just beyond the fence.

His and Yoichi’s footsteps echo as they skid to a stop.

The drones all turn.

Yoichi braces the butt of the rifle against his shoulder much more securely this time.

He takes down one, and Kudou catches two, before they level their little turrets.

Yoichi’s wearing ill-fitted kevlar underneath his coveralls, too, but Kudou drags them both to the ground when the bullets start spraying.  They drones are programmed to aim for the chest as the biggest, surest target, but a near miss puts a stinger through your throat or your jaw or your frontal lobe.  Dead is dead.

Yoichi gasps as they hit the cement, but Kudou is up again, in front of him, crouched low, blocking his head from the mechanical monsters.  His team needs Yoichi’s brain.  That much is obvious.

No more fucking around.

Kudou grits his teeth and concentrates.  He raises the pistol in his right hand and stabilizes his wrist with the left, lining up the shot as swiftly as he can.

He pulls the trigger.

And then he calls up the inexplicable power always cycling through him—always circling in the base of his chest and the back of his mind, humming at a frequency only he can hear—and guides the bullet.

He slams it into fourth gear right as three of the steel-encased spider-shaped bodies line up, which blasts it through all of them in the time it takes the next to turn its gun turret.  He fires another bullet, and another, fixating hard on both at once—timing, trajectory.  It’s all in the grip.  It’s all in the handhold, and the angle, and the determination.

He can’t steer things far from their original paths, but he can tilt them.  Just a little.

Sometimes a little is enough.

He shifts those two bullets through two drones each.

He releases his breath.

He doesn’t quite dare to lower the gun.

Metal corpses rain down to the asphalt.  One twists its propeller in a weak half-circle before the sparks spit, and it goes still.

Kudou can feel that Yoichi is staring at him—putting it together, likely, why none of the other organizations that hate his brother are willing to help them.

Kudou forces himself up to his feet, keeping the gun pointed at the pavement, and holds his hand out again.  He meets Yoichi’s eyes.

They’re fascinated.

But not afraid.

“Come on,” Kudou says, and Yoichi’s fingers curl tight.

They don’t get far.

There must be something programmed in, now, where an alarm goes off when a drone’s tracking signal disappears, and the others all flock towards the place that their predecessor went down.  It seems like it alerts the living, breathing, bleeding footsoldiers, too.

Kudou knows this city.  He knows the sidestreets and the shortcuts.  He knows which fences he can boost Yoichi over; knows which ladders they can climb and which rooftops’ ridges arc close enough together for Yoichi to jump.  He knows which abandoned shops’ back doors aren’t locked.  He knows the fastest route from anywhere, for anyone.  He has to.

This time, it’s not fast enough.

They’re still two full city blocks from the rendezvous—one wide street away from the canal.  Kudou would be able to see the sunlight glancing off the water if his attention wasn’t fixed on the armed lackeys that the last round of drones drove them into.  Rats in a trap.

But the low stone wall they ducked behind blocks the view of them enough that the guards can’t get a clean shot, and the drones coming up from the opposite direction haven’t pinpointed them yet.

Kudou reaches inside his crumpled coveralls, plucks one precious grenade off of his belt, and clenches his hand around it, listening closely to the arguing, watching the drones.  He doesn’t look at Yoichi.  He doesn’t have to.

“Go to the end of the wall,” he says.  “Sharp left.  Run straight to the water.  Shoot anything that moves.”

Yoichi wrenches himself up to his feet.  His fingers wrap around Kudou’s shoulder, grip it for a second, and then release.

He’s only made it about halfway down before the debate among the guards ends with one final threat, and the boots start coming close.

Kudou breathes out.

One of the drones flits sideways into view—a motion that reads as agitated.

But a motion all the same.

Kudou drags it through four gears, yanking it towards himself, and snatches it out of the air, pressing his thumb over the camera eye and pointing the turret outward.  It hacks helplessly with the blades as he clips the grenade to it, pulls the pin, breathes in, and counts.

One.

Two.

He flings it out towards the guards and shifts it again.

He scrapes himself up and runs like hell.

The blast throws him off of his feet—directly into the stucco wall of the building on his right, the tiny peaks of the finish stabbing through the coveralls and snagging in the fabric.

Which is the least of his concerns.

He fumbles to flatten his hands against it, shoves hard to push himself upright, and puts his feet beneath him—one at a time, laboriously, as his head rings, but then his body remembers that he has to survive.

Sharp left at the end of the wall.  His ears haven’t quite stopped echoing.  He dodges around the smoking wreckages of two downed drones, and then the especially mangled remains of a third—no bullet in this one.  Looks more like Yoichi knocked it out of the air and used the rifle like a baseball bat.

Speak of the Devil’s brother, as they don’t say.

Kudou catches up just as Yoichi, holding his side, panting for breath, nears the wall that cordons off the canal.

Kudou kneels, knitting his hands together, and holds them out for Yoichi to plant a foot on to scrabble up.  He’s gotten noticeably better at it in the past hour.  He hasn’t had much choice.

Yoichi clambers up onto the top of the wall, bracing himself with one hand until he can balance, still wheezing from the exertion of the run.  Kudou scrambles up after him.

It’s sixty feet down to the water, give or take some evaporation.

It looks further.

They’re positioned just ahead of a narrow pedestrian bridge, the iron struts of which are bolted to the concrete enclosing the water.  They’re still about a hundred feet downstream from the rendezvous, but the water’s moving slowly—barely any current to speak of.

It’s doable.

Kudou twists back, glances down, and grabs Yoichi’s hand.

Yoichi gasps for air at his shoulder.  “I can’t—I can’t swim—”

Kudou expected that.

He grabs the rifle strap and hauls it off over Yoichi’s head, tossing the gun back into the street behind them.  Higher odds it’ll strangle him than that it’ll come in useful now.

“Close your eyes,” Kudou says.  “When I tell you—exactly when I tell you—hold your breath, and let your body go limp.  Don’t let go of me.  No matter what.”

Yoichi stares at him for a second, shoulders hitching with his desperate attempts to breathe.

Yoichi swallows, hard.

Then he nods.

Kudou bought them just enough time—just enough.

“With me,” Kudou says.  “Out, not up.  Ready?”

Yoichi crushes his eyes shut and grips Kudou’s hand.  “No.”

No one ever is.

“Now,” Kudou says.

He pushes off as hard as he can to compensate.

But Yoichi gives it everything he’s got.

The wall drops away.  The waterway opens up beneath them.  Low gear, for an instant—everything seems very, very slow.

And then gravity takes its due.

It feels like the fall lasts far too long.  Yoichi squeezes his hand—not quite a question.  Not quite doubt.

Kudou watches the canal rise up to meet them, suddenly sudden, and squeezes back.  “Now!”

One second too early on purpose, in case it took Yoichi an extra instant to register the command.  It gives Kudou time to gasp in the deepest breath he can, and clutch Yoichi’s hand a little tighter still.

They slam into the surface of the water.

It splits—sprays, geysers, swallows them whole.  The world goes dark, silent, claustrophobic, and cold.

Kudou’s skin smarts everywhere that his body hit the water—stinging, needling—but he kept hold of Yoichi’s hand.

The murky water admits just enough light to see his surroundings, but he wouldn’t have needed to turn and watch the bubbles streaming towards the surface—the way Yoichi hauls on his hand tells enough of the story.  The shock of the impact overwhelmed his intentions.  His body undermined his brain.

And now he thinks he’s going to drown.

Kudou hauls violently on his hand, dragging him in close enough to sling an arm around his waist, and sets his sights on the flickering, filtered light playing on the water overhead.

Yoichi writhes in his grip for a second, choking soundlessly, his pale hair floating wildly around his face.

Their momentum sent them deep.  But Kudou isn’t going to lose him.  Not now.

Yoichi hardly weighs a damn thing anyway.

Kudou kicks with almost all the strength that he has left, and tiny bubbles streak out of Yoichi’s mouth.  The water pulls at his boots and the metal gauntlets, but he planned for that.  Kudou never plans to lose.

His muscles strain, and his body aches, and his lungs burn, and he pushes harder.  Just a little further.  Just a little more.

Yoichi convulses inside the circle of his arm.

The water parts for them.

Kudou gasps in the first breath greedily and then hoists Yoichi higher.  He sacrifices a few seconds’ paddling from his left hand to shove all of the sopping wet hair out of Yoichi’s face.  Yoichi’s already coughing fit to give himself a hernia.

Which means that he’ll be fine.

Kudou kicks sideways, propelling them over towards the pedestrian bridge supports, and Yoichi scrabbles for a better grip on him, coughing, gasping, wheezing, coughing again.

“I’m s—” He chokes on the words as his lungs try to eject more water.  “S-sorry—”

“For what?” Kudou says.  “Just breathe.  Come on.”

He has to look around them to gauge the distances and the angle, but he can feel Yoichi staring.

Then one more shuddering, bedraggled breath.

And then Yoichi starts kicking too.

Their combined efforts carry them over.  Kudou hooks his other arm around the support beam of the bridge.  This is the part of the plan where it gets dicey.

He shifts their position.  The current eddies behind the huge steel post, which increases its pull here, but he needs the leverage of something solid.

“Hold on to me,” he says.  “No matter what.”

Yoichi doesn’t ask—doesn’t even nod.  His arms sling around Kudou’s neck and cinch tight.  He’s still struggling to breathe.  “Here?”

“Yeah,” Kudou says.  No sense counting down—no point hesitating.  “Brace yourself.”

Yoichi’s grip tightens.

It’ll have to be enough.

Kudou wrangles them around to plant both of his feet against the support beam, pulling them partway up out of the water with his arm.  He looks over his shoulder at the waterway ahead, still separating them from the target point—straight path, minimal current.  Keep their trajectory even, overshoot, and the canal will bring them right in to the nook with a rusted maintenance ladder.

If they get that far.

If this works.

Time to find out.

Kudou bends his knees.  He draws a breath.  He lets go of the beam with his arm, and they start to fall towards the water.

He pushes off.

He clenches his fists around the gauntlet levers, firing from both sides.

And he grasps onto the back collar of his own bulletproof vest with Gear Shift, and hauls as hard and as fast and as forcefully as he has ever moved anything before.

The first shift jerks them so violently that it wallops the breath out of Kudou’s lungs, and Yoichi makes a faint noise, clinging harder, and buries his face in Kudou’s neck even with the water so close.

The hydraulics in the gauntlets wrench at Kudou’s arms and his elbows, but he locks his joints—aligns himself with the trajectory, minimizing the wasted force.

Five blades left.

He doesn’t save them.

He keeps firing, one pull of the triggers after another after another, and yanks at his vest, flinging them as far as he can, grinding his way up to a higher gear even as his head whirls, and his stomach flips.  His lungs don’t draw another breath—they can’t.  His body won’t move.  His fingers flex, rhythmically now, more of an instinct than an impulse.  The harsh spray of the water around them stings his skin and his eyes anew, flares out around them like an aura, glitters in the light; the little waves they skim across buffet them again and again, rattling his teeth in his skull and bruising his spine.  Concentrate.  He has to concentrate.  They have one damn chance.

He reaches the last blades.  The walls whip by.  There’s a shadow—the bridge.  It has to be the bridge.  Almost—

He fires the last ones—makes himself weaponless.

And he digs down in his chest and scrabbles for a grip on the volcanic heat—the primal potential barely contained in him.  He channels it up and out, dragging them further—just a little further—just a little more—

He’s never pulled this much weight before, let alone through water as well as air resistance.

It feels like a kick to the chest, at first—and then one to the side, and then his whole skeleton starts to ache, and their speed drops, and the power dwindles, and they start to sink.

Not yet—

A vast band of shadow drapes itself over his burning eyes.

Gear Shift gives out.

The water laps against them as the momentum dies, and their bodies drop into the water, and Yoichi’s vise grip on Kudou’s vest starts to feel like a stranglehold.

They’re five feet from the ladder.

Everything aches as he treads water—for both of them, for one long second before Yoichi catches on and starts to kick.  Kudou squints up at the top of the ladder.

Asano.

Lowering a cord alongside it.

Their eyes meet.

Asano smiles.

They’re not out of the woods just yet.

But they never will be if Kudou doesn’t move, now, while they’re all alive.

He puts his back into it one more time.

The water drags at him hard enough that he considers detaching the gauntlets and leaving them in the canal, but he’s survived worse.  And they will.

Yoichi scrabbles for the ladder rungs the instant they come into reach.  His wet fingers slip and foil his first attempt, but then he latches on and immediately starts to climb.

Except that as soon as he’s clear of the water, he hooks his arm around the next rung up and reaches back and down—his thin, pale hand stretched out to Kudou.

Whose weight might dislocate his shoulder right about now.

“Go,” Kudou says.  “Quick.”

The cable drops far enough to come level with Yoichi in a matter of moments.  Kudou catches up—ignoring the way his own breath sounds louder than Yoichi’s for once—and grabs the back of Yoichi’s coveralls to halt him long enough to wrap the rope across his chest, diagonally in both directions and then several times around his waist.  Kudou tugs twice.  Asano’s skin shines stark red for a second, and then his arms ripple as his muscles expand, and he starts pulling the cord up.

Yoichi barely has to touch the ladder after that.

Kudou keeps his eyes on the next rung, and the next.  The rusted metal and the peeling paint hurt distantly—pinpricks against the flood of feeling he’s blocked off.

Just a ladder.  Just climb.  Just move.

The adrenaline is ebbing enough that the distractions accumulate—water sluices down his back.  The gauntlets bite into his arms, jarred out of their ordinary position by all of the unusual movement, which he doesn’t have the leverage or the time to fix.  His boots feel like lead weights.  The half-displaced holster straps cut into his chest.  His head pounds, insistently, in time with his thundering heartbeat, and his eyes despise the light.

But he’s close.

He’s close enough to hear the truck engine idling, and then he’s close enough to hear the shouts—not too many streets away, but not approaching fast enough to constitute a threat.  The series of swift, reckless choices served its purpose.  It let them disappear.

And then Kudou is close enough for Asano to reach one meta-ability-augmented arm out to him.

Kudou’s fingers don’t even clasp all the way around his forearm like this.  Asano yanks him easily up and over the wall, sopping wet clothes and metal accoutrements notwithstanding.

Asano sets him down on his feet.  His knees go out.  Asano flicks open the roll-up door on the back of the truck like he’s opening a window-shade, not compelling a substantial amount of steel.  Kudou manages to push himself up onto his knees before Asano grabs his shoulder, hoists him upright, and manhandles him into the back of the truck.  The door clatters down again.  Asano bangs twice on the door.  Kudou kicks the pin on the interior lock, and it slots into place.  Asano’s footsteps retreat, and then the door to the cab slams, and then the engine revs in earnest.

Yoichi, an arm’s length away, pushes himself up onto one elbow.

Kudou rolls just far enough to put a hand on his shoulder and shove him back down onto the floor.

Yoichi’s indignation melts away when Asano hits the gas, and they both slide three feet on the ridged steel flooring.

Kudou crawls back to where he started and collapses again.  His clothes squelch.

Once the bumping of the truck bed has settled slightly, Yoichi drags himself over, too.  He’s wincing.

“I’m sorry,” Yoichi says.  “I thought I could—”

“Stop saying that,” Kudou says, but he’s too damn tired just now to roll over and look at Yoichi, instead of at the corrugated metal ceiling.  “You’re amazing.”

He meant to say You were.

But he didn’t.

Yoichi stays quiet for a few seconds.  Too late to take it back.  Too late for a lot of things.

“I don’t feel amazing,” Yoichi says.  “I feel wet.”

Kudou manages to shift enough to eye him for that one.  “You’re definitely that, too.”

Yoichi smiles, of course.

Kudou should have expected that.

The scanner outside the door of the control room-slash-armory only accepts two handprints.  Kudou’s is one.

Bruce is grinning up at them when Kudou steps in—Yoichi trailing him, both of them trailing canal water.  Kudou pries the gauntlets off and leans them against the wall.  He grabs up a blanket and tosses it to Yoichi, who startles sharply—but catches it, unfolds it, slings it around his shoulders, and huddles underneath.

Kudou lays a towel out on the table and starts disassembling the pistols, patting pieces dry as he goes.  Bruce spins once in the chair next to the monitor screens.  Behind him, the feeds from the cameras that they’ve secreted around the hotspots flicker and fizz.  One of them shows a glimpse of Asano parking the truck.  Bruce turns down the clamoring radio.

“Now, that,” he says, “was art.”

Yoichi pulls the blanket in tighter.  “Art involves a lot of running.”

“And diving,” Bruce says, “apparently.”

Kudou gives him a look.  He just grins back.

“This is too big for anybody to ignore,” Bruce says.  “And when you add it on top of the bridge, it makes it clear that we know what we’re doing—”

They don’t.

“—and that we’re just getting started,” Bruce says, folding his hands behind his head and tilting the chair back until it squeaks.  “They’re going to be scared shitless.”

Kudou empties one magazine, and then the other, spilling bullets out across the worn terrycloth.

Yoichi tips his head.

“My brother won’t be scared,” Yoichi says.  “He doesn’t understand fear.  But he’ll be angry.  And anger makes him make mistakes.”

“Call it what you want,” Bruce says.  “It’s progress.”

It’s also a target on all of their backs, blown to greater proportions than they’ve ever seen.

But they’re right.  It’s worth it.  It has to be.

Bruce is right about another thing—this is the start of something.  It’s one domino.  It’s one stepping stone.  It’s only an accomplishment in its own right insofar as it segues to their next move.

Kudou needs to figure out what the next move is.  They need something bigger and better and more impactful—more damaging, more shocking.  A greater statement.  A larger goal.

But the enemy will anticipate that.  The thugs will be out in force; the drones will flock through the skies.  They could adjust the tactic instead—send smaller teams for less-valuable targets, maybe half a dozen pairs of people, all at once.  Strike very quickly at places that he won’t have thought to protect because he expects them to aim for another symbol.  They can watch and see if he pulls security staff away from the warehouses to cover the major pieces of infrastructure.  He won’t know what hit him.

Kudou lays the last piece of cold metal down in an open spot on the towel, flattens out the corners, and adjusts the components to separate them from each other.

Not a decision to be made now, when the last of the adrenaline is still surging through him.  Right now, he feels invincible.  He’s not.

“We need to clean up,” he says.  His coveralls collected so much water that they’re still dripping on the floor.  Yoichi didn’t fare any better.

Bruce folds his arms, which is his version of a wince.  “We siphoned a lot of resources this week to make those bombs,” he says.  “It’s already going to stick out on the power grid to anybody looking close.”

Kudou expected that.  “Just give me whatever’s safe.”

Yoichi glances at him, then back to Bruce.

Who looks them up and down before shaking his head, which is his version of a sigh.

“Three minutes,” he says.  “Tops.”

Yoichi pauses—and then his mind, as always, assembles it from the pieces.

“Of hot water?” he asks.  At Bruce’s nod, he turns to Kudou, with that same damn smile.  “Ninety seconds each.  That’s plenty.”

Kudou reaches for his elbow, which is much less elusive than his wrist, and pulls him back out into the hall.  “Don’t be stupid.  We have no idea what kind of pollutants there are in the canal water these days.  And I’m not going to risk you getting sick.”

Yoichi’s hand settles on top of his.  He pulls away.  Yoichi doesn’t react.  “I’ll be fine.”

Kudou stops in front of the door to his room.  Meaningfully, he looks Yoichi up and down.

Yoichi is too damn smart not to know that he bears more than a passing resemblance to a drowned rat.  Even swathed in the blanket now, he’s still actively shivering.

The smile twists rueful.  “You deserve it more than anyone,” Yoichi says.

No one deserves anything.

Kudou unlocks the door.  He pulls Yoichi inside, pulls the door shut, and pushes Yoichi towards the shower stall.  Yoichi’s eyes flick past him, but there’s hardly anything to see—narrow bed, narrow desk, folding chair, cracked lamp, tarnished old electric kettle.  Bruce is going to kill him for plugging it in and running it, but he’s going to need a cup of coffee more than oxygen after a cold-water scrub.

Obediently, Yoichi hands him the damp blanket.  Kudou drapes it over the back of the chair.  Yoichi is shivering harder by the time he peels his shirt off, and Kudou has to squeeze past him to turn the water on.

Kudou holds his hand under the spray.  It’s tolerable in just under eight seconds, which leaves Yoichi with another hundred and seventy-two.

Yoichi steps past him, into the stall—stripped bare, pale like a beacon—and then reaches back.

He catches Kudou’s wrist in both slender hands.  Tiny droplets stick in his eyelashes, and the steam curls around that smile.

His hands are warm, and his grip is tight.

“Don’t be stupid,” he says, eyes bright, and he pulls Kudou in.

It’s too easy.

Kudou hauls his clothes off and drops them on the floor before they can steal any of the warmth.

Yoichi’s skin seems almost luminescent when the soap gleams on it.  It should look sickly, not pretty.  It shouldn’t make Kudou’s mouth water.

A hundred and seventy seconds is barely long enough to make a single pass at scraping dreck and toxic traces from the skin in question, let alone all that silver-white hair.

Yoichi’s fingers trail through Kudou’s hair, too—with a meticulous slowness, at first; and then sinking unmistakably into a different intent.

Kudou thinks Bruce cut the hot water a little short.

But it doesn’t matter much.

Yoichi makes an embarrassingly cursory effort at toweling Kudou dry before trying to drop onto the bed and drag Kudou with him.  Kudou hauls him back up, whips the towel around behind him, rubs it up his spine, and scrapes it across his shoulder-blades.  The way Yoichi folds in against him feels familiar, somehow.  The opposite of a surprise—a spill of recognition, soaking in.

Kudou strokes the towel down along his arms, one at at time—over his ribs; over his hips; then draws it back up and tousles at his hair.

Yoichi smiles, starlight-bright.

Kudou believes in bullets and in bunkers and in the power of greed to bury a city overnight.  There’s no path.  There’s no guide.  There’s no justice.

There’s just you.

And the choice.

He doesn’t regret this one yet.

No one who is not unholily persistent would have spent days on end holed up in a dark room, tinkering with combinations of chemicals and detonators that could have killed them at the slip of a finger.  Kudou knows what Yoichi is made of, and what he’s capable of.  Kudou can feel the way he thinks.

It’s fucking beautiful.  It’s an oiled machine, the pieces slotting perfectly together, the gears turning seamlessly, soundlessly, smoothly.  It’s a complicated clockwork covered in ornamental filigree.  It’s intricate and unlikely and ruthlessly effective and unknowable and creative and fantastical and kind.

Kudou wants to kiss him primarily because Kudou wants to breathe him in.  He shouldn’t be possible.  He shouldn’t exist.  There is so little wonder left in the world.

Kudou lets the towel crumple to the floor.  He settles his hands on either side of Yoichi’s neck and drags his thumbs back and forth along Yoichi’s jaw.

Yoichi steps in towards him—too close.  Yoichi presses his damp chest to Kudou’s, nudges his hips in, slings both arms around the back of Kudou’s neck to pin him where he stands.  Close off the exit.  Prevent a retreat.

Kudou can’t remember the last time he didn’t want to run.

There’s a huge bruise on Yoichi’s left side, as well as several other smaller ones scattered nearby, and several more concentrated around his knees.  They’ve faded too much into teal and brown and yellow to be from today, and the big one just below his ribs is shaped like a foot.

Kudou eases him down onto the bed and sits down on the edge.  He drags the far side of the duvet close enough to fold it over on top of Yoichi’s feet.  He leans down and rests his hands on Yoichi’s hipbones and kisses slowly around the circumference of that biggest bruise.

“It’s fine,” Yoichi whispers.

Kudou looks up just far enough to glare at him.

Yoichi covers his face with both hands, grin softened into something fragile, his body twisting.  “Don’t do this to me.”

“You started it,” Kudou mutters.

Yoichi’s hands lift, and then the graceful fingers glide over Kudou’s face—his cheek, his jaw, sliding up into his hair.

“No,” Yoichi says.  “You did.”

Liar.  Kudou isn’t the one looking at him every other second, watching like he’s fascinating—like he’s precious and unprecedented.  Like he’s wonderful.

What’s wonderful is the way Yoichi’s back arches, and his breath stutters, when Kudou fits one knee between his thighs and breathes against his sternum, hot and slow.

Yoichi’s hands are everywhere—carding through his wet hair, dragging down his back, squeezing shamelessly at his ass and the backs of his thighs, urging him on when he hasn’t even figured out if this is real yet.  Caressing Yoichi in the shower felt like a fever dream.  This—

Feels real.  Feels far too real, too immediate, too intense.  This feels inescapable.

Kudou kisses up Yoichi’s throat, slowly, trying to touch every individual ridge.  Yoichi’s hair fans out across the blanket as he tips his head back, his next breath leaving in a rasping sigh.  He hooks his right leg around the small of Kudou’s back and tries to pull him in again, hands dancing up and down over his ribs.

He manages to crush Kudou’s hips down against his—which should probably hurt.  Which should probably summon pain signals for both of them, instead of lighting all of Kudou’s local nerves like sparklers and making Yoichi gasp aloud and hitch his body upward—harder this time.

Kudou buries his face in the side of Yoichi’s neck while it shivers through him, resisting the urge to bite down on the soft skin to try to dispel the heat.  It wouldn’t work anyway.  Nothing works.  He’s been trying for a week.

He gathers himself.  He shifts back.  He plants his right hand flat on the bed to brace his weight and returns his attention to the task of working his way down Yoichi’s chest, tasting as much of it as he dares given how little time they spent washing off the soap.  There’s a newer bruise forming on Yoichi’s right shoulder—bright mottled pink where the recoil made the rifle strike him.

There are worse apologies than this.

Kudou traces his collarbones, follows the subtle curve of them in and downward, learns the dips and swells, the softnesses and the idiosyncrasies—savors every centimeter.

There are goosebumps on a number of the centimeters that make up Yoichi’s arms.

Kudou sits back, grasps Yoichi’s waist in both hands, hikes him up enough to shift him over to the far side of the bed, and pulls the rest of the duvet out from under him.  With it loose, Kudou can drape it over his own back, and reposition himself over Yoichi again, and lean in to keep it draping close enough to hold some heat.

Yoichi’s hands range over his chest, the dark green eyes following their progress with such incisive fascination that a part of Kudou wants to pull away.  Yoichi’s fingertips are strange and soft and cool as they skim over the constellation of nicks and scars and bruises marring Kudou’s skin.

“You’ve made it through so much,” Yoichi says.

They’re not trophies.

They’re mistakes.

They’re records of the times that he fucked up bad enough to invite the end, and he barely slipped away.

If he was smarter, and faster, and more precise—if he’d planned better—he’d be clean.

Kudou tries to wrap the blanket tighter around them.  “You’re cold.”

Yoichi’s eyes don’t leave his skin.  The smile doesn’t falter.  “Not now.  Not anymore.”

The way his gaze lingers next on Kudou’s achingly hard cock doesn’t help.  His fingers skim down, slowing as they reach the spire of coarse hair trailing down Kudou’s stomach.  Yoichi’s nails graze back and forth, catching in it, scratching gently, tugging in a way that’s maddeningly playful and brushes the backs of his wrists against Kudou’s cock, which is transcendent and excruciating in equal parts.

Kudou tries to pull the sheet on the bed inward over Yoichi’s shoulders, and against his waist and closer to his thighs, to insulate the parts of him that aren’t moving.  His hair’s not quite wet enough to drip, but it’s a close thing.

Yoichi curls one cool hand around his cock and strokes.

Kudou grits his teeth and forces his hands to stay mostly steady as he drags in all of the fabric on the entire bed, gathering a fence of folds around Yoichi.

Evidently he is the only one currently concerned about the cold.

Yoichi catches Kudou’s left hand and raises it directly to his mouth, the better to drag his tongue extremely slowly up the palm and start laving shamelessly at Kudou’s fingers.  The wicked contentment in his half-lidded eyes heats Kudou’s guts until they feel molten.  The velvet press of his tongue is bad enough, but then he takes Kudou’s first two fingers directly into his mouth, and Kudou’s mind goes roaringly blank for so long that his own damn tongue feels numb.

“You don’t know where those’ve been,” he manages.

Yoichi draws his tongue slowly, slowly, fastidiously up the length of Kudou’s longest finger.  “I have an idea.”  His eyes crinkle at the corners with a new and warmer and worse iteration of that goddamn smile.  “And I know very well where I’d like them to be.”

Kudou chokes on his breath.  Feels clumsy and undignified and uncontrolled.  Feels like he’s free.  “You in a hurry, or what?”

Yoichi licks his way back down, moves over to Kudou’s index finger, favors the knuckle with so much attention that Kudou’s throat goes dry.  “Mm… no.  Just… feels like I’ve been waiting for this forever.  Now I’ve finally got it.”  He breathes against the gleaming wet skin, focused on that for a long second before his eyes slide sideways and pin Kudou’s—the depth of them stills Kudou’s hands.  It kills his voice.  “I want everything.”

Maybe Yoichi is a little like his brother.  Maybe there’s a sliver that’s the same.

He must see it for what it is.

Kudou is helpless in his hands.

Kudou is at his feet.

But if all he asks—if all he claims from his dominion—is what Kudou wants tremblingly to give him in the first place—

If the only conquest that he craves is precisely what Kudou’s entire being already begs for—

Why deny him?

It’s not like there’s anyone left to placate with good behavior.

It’s not like there’s anything left to lose.

Kudou draws his spit-slicked fingers out of Yoichi’s mouth and drags them across his cheek.  There’s a faint pink flush setting in.  Kudou would be willing to bet he can ignite it—turn it to sunset colors and sweat.  Bring it all the way to life.

He cups his fingers around the base of Yoichi’s skull, twining them into the silken hair, and curls them tighter when Yoichi writhes in his grip.

“‘Everything’,” he says, “doesn’t mean anything.  You have to start with something.”

Yoichi isn’t smiling this time.

He’s smirking.

“Hmm,” he says.  He uses the leverage of his leg around Kudou’s back to arch higher up off of the bed, rolling his hips against Kudou’s, watching through his eyelashes for the reaction.  “Any suggestions?”

Past the point of asking.  Past the point of guessing.  Past the point of turning back.

Kudou leans down and kisses him.  His breath catches and then comes loose in a long, low sigh with a rough edge like it should have been a moan.  Kudou threads his fingers deeper into Yoichi’s hair, thumb settling at the hinge of his jaw, and bites his lower lip, and then the upper one, and then licks his tongue.  Yoichi whimpers, arms tightening around him, and one hand flickers up over his shoulder-blade to wrap itself around the back of his neck.

And pull him in closer.

Feels like falling.

For all that talk of everything, Kudou can’t get enough of him.  Kudou wants to breathe in every bit of him, wants to map the roof of his mouth and taste the back of his throat, wants both of them to choke out prayers they don’t believe in and pleas that they don’t trust.  Kudou’s blood is burning.  It’s not enough.

Yoichi has every limb bent around him now, hauling on him, trying to fit them closer when there’s hardly any other place their skin could meet.

Kudou pries them apart far enough to flatten a hand on Yoichi’s chest and pin him down, panting against his mouth, watching the bridge of his nose and the slow rise of his eyelids come into focus.  His mouth—his eyes—

Yoichi’s fingers scratch up into his hair.  Yoichi clenches his fingers and uses the leverage to pull Kudou back down against him, close enough to breathe into his ear.  “Before you ask,” he says, “yes.  All of it.  Now.”

He knows, all right.  He knows Kudou’s weak for him.

Kudou is also practical.  Kudou despises very little more than being unprepared.  He presses his cheek against Yoichi’s in acknowledgement and then pushes harder to signal to him to release his grip.

Yoichi lets go.

Kudou crawls far enough to reach the desk, to rummage through the lowest drawer for the tattered shoebox full of near-exhausted tubes of itch cream and ointment and the other medical oddities that occasionally become critically convenient.  Burn gel.  Baramycin.  Camphor oil.  Cough syrup.

And, at the bottom, a plastic bottle of just enough lube.

Yoichi makes a slight effort to hide the grin behind his hand.  “You’re a miracle.  I thought we were going to have to resort to the shampoo.”

Kudou’s expression must speak volumes, but whatever he might have said about bubbles where they aren’t wanted and the wrong kind of conditioning escapes him in the face of Yoichi’s amusement.  Kudou was an idiot to think this man was weaponless when they found him.

“I wouldn’t put you in that position,” Kudou says.

Yoichi’s eyes glimmer, and his arm snakes around the back of Kudou’s neck again.  “You can put me in any position that you like.”

Kudou glares down at him, the bottle clenched in one fist, the other spread out on the sheets.

Yoichi is, if anything, emboldened by the disapproval.  His fingertips trail down Kudou’s back, butterfly-light.  “You’re not going to break me.”

Kudou snorts, then nudges his nose at the wide new bruise on Yoichi’s shoulder from the gun.  “Are you sure?”

“Would it be the worst thing?” Yoichi murmurs, breath tinglingly warm against his ear again.  “If you did?”

Kudou looks at him until the smile settles, and his eyes soften.  Until he’s listening.

“You’re going to tell me,” Kudou says, “when it’s too much.”

There’s something slightly quizzical in Yoichi’s expression now, but it doesn’t undercut the seriousness.  His fingers stroke down over the back of Kudou’s neck, then down his spine.

“I will,” he says.

Kudou believes him.  That’s the part that’s unbelievable.

He sits back, bunches the blankets around Yoichi’s shoulders, hesitates when the curve from Yoichi’s hip down to his thigh begs for his attention.  He shifts back further, leans down, cradles Yoichi’s knee in one hand, and kisses upward from it.  The skin’s so soft.  Yoichi squirms when he approaches the crease—ticklish.  His cock is still half-hard, even after all that conversation.  The thick hair around it is a darker silver, like the shadow on a cloud.

Kudou kisses up his cock, too, and the breathless noise that leaves him is almost a laugh.  “What are you doing?” Yoichi says.  “I’m not going anywhere.”

Kudou finds the bottle in the tangled sheets, uncaps it, and lets the fluid warm up on his fingertips.  He meets Yoichi’s eyes.

“Good,” he says.

Being in him is exactly that: good.  Too good.  Too good to be true, too good to believe, too good to withstand.

To be found, to be known—in this world, in this life—is past reckoning, and past description.

Kudou doesn’t draw it out, but he does make sure Yoichi comes first.  Yoichi never seems to be anyone’s priority—no one else’s, and not his own.

Kudou has long since given up on the concept of a win-win situation, but this might just be one after all.  The hot red flush illuminating Yoichi’s cheeks has seeped down to his collarbones.  His fingers curl so tight in Kudou’s hair that Kudou’s scalp stings.  Yoichi’s back arches, his breath sticks, his whole body tightens around Kudou’s throbbing cock, and Kudou gets to watch euphoria spill out through him in a tidal wave—flooding his veins, shuddering outward, suffusing his face.  Kudou gets to kiss the ecstasy off of his lips and steal it off his gasps and try to lick it out of the inside of his mouth, and then tip off the edge after him.

It’s too perfect.  Too sublime for the life he recognizes.  So good it’s suspicious.  So good he’s scared.

Yoichi isn’t.

Kudou lets himself lie there for one second, two, three—draped on top of Yoichi, unthinkingly counting out his heartbeats.  Yoichi’s fingers dance down the back of his neck and then up again, toy with his hair, stroke it back into place.  Kudou’s left hand ended up curled around Yoichi’s shoulder.  He runs his thumb back and forth over the sharp angle of the collarbone that joins it.  His thoughts fizzle.  Some of them swell and gleam like the soap bubbles, and then pop before he can try to grasp them in his hands.

He lets himself lie there for what must be a lot of seconds, in the end.

Then he sits up and extracts the damp towel that he folded up and wedged under Yoichi’s hips, and repurposes it for attempting to wipe both of them as clean as can be expected.  He doesn’t figure Bruce would risk the security of the entire complex to grant them a little more hot water for this.

He wouldn’t change it.

Not yet, he should say.  His head hasn’t settled.  He hasn’t thought it through.  He just did it.  He just reached for what he wanted and took it.  No plan.

Yoichi wrinkles his nose when Kudou scrubs cum off of his stomach, trying idly to catch his hands.  Kudou pitches the towel at the laundry pile in the corner.  He lays one hand on Yoichi’s hip and the other on the bed, bracing himself enough to lean in and nudge Yoichi’s sweat- and shower-damp bangs off of his forehead, so that he can graze his lips across it.  Yoichi smiles.

It’s not Yoichi’s fault that Kudou is who he is.  It’s not Yoichi’s fault that the world has wrung so much from both of them, and stranded them with whatever’s left.

Kudou settles on the bed again.  There’s no point asking the question.  The sensations didn’t seem to surprise Yoichi, but the fact that he enjoyed them did.  It’s nothing that Kudou can fix.

He has his arm curled around Yoichi’s narrow shoulders.  He tugs the warm—warm-ish—body close enough to press his mouth to Yoichi’s jaw and keep it there.

He can feel the smile unfurling.

He gives it one more moment.

Then he lets go and gets up.  Yoichi sits up, knuckles at his eyes, stretches his back.  Kudou pulls some pants on and pitches one of his shirts at Yoichi.

Yoichi doesn’t catch it—and also doesn’t dodge it.  He just turns his face away and lets it hit him, and then he gathers it up and hauls it on.

It’s loose around him—it hangs off of his shoulders, the neck gaping so wide that it frames every last inch of his collarbones.  It should look pathetic, not indecent.  Not appealing.

He draws it in around himself, pulling the fabric every which way, like he’s bundling into an oversized coat.  He smiles.

Kudou makes himself turn away.  He fills the kettle from the showerhead.  He plugs it in and turns it on.  He spoons a heap of instant coffee into his mug.  He chooses to make the mistake of sitting down on the bed again while he waits.

Yoichi crawls over.  The shirt drapes off of him, billows around him.  The pale hairs on his legs make them blur to the eye when he moves, like an aura all around him.  Kudou should be watching his face—not his thighs, not his back.  He moves languidly, like a satisfied cat.

He curls up against Kudou like one, too.  He slides both arms around Kudou’s waist, knitting his hands together where they meet.  He leans his head on Kudou’s bare shoulder, hair still damp.

Kudou could push him away.  Kudou could tell him that it was meant to be casual, that it’s a product of the adrenaline rush, that it’s a problem of physicality.  Kudou could tell him that it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t mean anything.

But Yoichi knows how he thinks, too, somehow—reads every silence.

Yoichi doesn’t say anything.  He settles, breathing softly, where he’s wrapped around Kudou like he never wants to leave.  Kudou reaches back and pulls one of the blankets up over both of their shoulders this time.  He lowers his head enough to let it rest against Yoichi’s, a little.  Gently.

The kettle starts to hum, and then to rattle.

Yoichi’s fingertips sweep idly back and forth over Kudou’s skin.  He shifts, nudging his cheek against Kudou’s shoulder before he stills again.

Kudou doesn’t remember what the last thing that felt this simple was.

The water roils, tiny bubbles whirling.

He touches Yoichi’s knee before he extracts himself from the circle of Yoichi’s arms, stretching far enough to flick the switch and kill the power before it comes all the way to a boil.  He pours into the mug.  He always stirs with the same coffee-stained chopstick.  They raised him better.  Didn’t help.

He sits back.  He bolts down two mouthfuls and then presses the mug into Yoichi’s hands.  He leaves his fingers wrapped around Yoichi’s for one second—two seconds—before letting go.

Yoichi smiles.  He slides the first two fingers of his right hand into the ring of the handle, cradles the mug in his hands, and raises it to his mouth.  He sips.

Then he stops smiling.

He swallows, laboriously, and makes a face.

“Is this how you like your coffee?” he asks.

“No,” Kudou says.

Yoichi’s head tilts.  There’s something wrong with him.  Maybe it’s the strange softness of his eyes.  They make you want to tell the truth.

“I like it sweet,” Kudou says.  “So sweet that there’s a slush of sugar at the bottom when you’re done.  And so much cream that it’s barely even brown anymore.”  He doesn’t waste the effort on a shrug.  Yoichi knows.  He doesn’t have to say When we have those, they’re better allocated elsewhere.

Yoichi smiles.  He takes Kudou’s hand, fits the mug back into it.

“There was a coffee shop,” he says.  “Near the place we stayed when we were young.  I would sit outside and wait for him even when it was cold.  They recognized me after a while.  The woman who owned it made me a mocha with raspberry syrup, once, and the foam on the top was like a field of clouds.  I don’t know if I’ve ever been that happy in my life.”

He wraps his other hand around Kudou’s, and the mug, and the awful coffee.

“At least,” he says, the smile shifting, “not until now.”

Kudou makes himself breathe around the jaggedness in him.  “Don’t say that.”

Yoichi presses his hands in gently around Kudou’s before he lets go.  “Aren’t you?  Happy, I mean.”

Kudou grips the mug in his left hand, reaching out with the right to tug the blanket up over Yoichi’s shoulder again, smoothing his own damn shirt over the too-sharp collarbone beneath.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kudou says.  “You should never say the important things out loud.”

Yoichi ducks, mouth grazing over the back of Kudou’s forearm before he can pull it back.  “Or what?  Who’s going to stop me?”

Kudou shoves the coffee mug onto the table and grabs a fistful of that shirt instead, dragging Yoichi in to kiss him, and then kiss him again.  Yoichi laughs into his mouth, and against it, and swallows all of Kudou’s breaths.

Somehow he tastes sweet.

What doesn’t make sense is the fact that this does.  It feels obvious.  It’s too easy.

Kudou should be asking himself a thousand questions.  He should be second-guessing, backtracking, double-checking, data-gathering.  He should be spinning out thoughts.  He should be bursting with speculations.  He should be planning.

But it’s so quiet.

It’s so quiet, in his mind, when he looks at this impossibly strange stranger.  When Yoichi catches him looking and smiles like it’s a reflex—like there was never any other choice.

There’s always a choice.

The blanket keeps slipping off of him.  Kudou leans over to grab the jacket crumpled on the seat of the chair and makes Yoichi thread his arms through it, pulls it in around him, carefully guides his hair loose.

“Sorry,” Yoichi says.  He adjusts the dragging collar of Kudou’s shirt, tugs the jacket in closer and rubs his cheek against the well-worn fleece.  “I’m afraid I haven’t cultivated much of a fashion sense.”

Kudou feels his eyebrows rising.  As if he has.  As if any of it is nurtured, not necessitated.  As if he’s done anything but survive in a long, long time.

“You look better in them than I do,” he says.

Yoichi smiles.  There’s mischief in it.  Where does that come from?  How can he dredge it up from nothing?

“I can keep them,” he says.  “How about if I take ownership of all of your clothes, and you go around naked?”

Kudou doesn’t laugh.

But he wants to.

“Not sure that would inspire the troops,” he says.

Yoichi’s grin is sugar-warm and wicked.  “I think you’d be surprised.”

Kudou gets up, shoulders an old sweater on, drops the kevlar vest on top of it.  You never know.  You never know when an alarm will sound, in the opposite direction from the room you left your armor in.  You never know how much time you’ve been granted until you run out.

“I think we need to get some food in you,” Kudou says, “before you get any crazier.”

Yoichi just smiles.

Kudou thinks it’s catching.

He thinks he’s going crazy, too.

There’s a little flicker, in his chest—flighty and persistent like panic, but so, so soft.

He doesn’t trust it, but it doesn’t seem to care.

“What’s next?” Bruce asks before Yoichi has even settled in the chair at the end of the table in the kitchen.

Yoichi smiles.  “I had a few things in mind.  What do you recommend?”

Asano’s eyes linger on the way that Kudou’s clothes hang off of his frame, but his were soaked.  Unless someone was listening at the door, the only evidence of anything unusual is how long it took them to leave the room after the shower water stopped.  They could have been strategizing.

“Maybe another piece of infrastructure,” Bruce says, ignoring his food.  “Today’s loss will be extremely inconvenient for him, but it’s less symbolic for the city.  Destroying something visible doubles as a show of power.”

“He’ll be watching them,” Asano says.  “The bridges.  He always knows what we’re going to do before we do.”

“He’s not psychic,” Yoichi says, quietly.  “He’s just smart.”

Asano eyes him.

Oda sets her tray down, kicking a chair back and dropping into it.  “Go in from underneath.”

Bruce nods slowly.  “We could take the sewers until we’re close.  He can’t see through concrete yet.”  He smiles thinly.  “That we know of.”

“He’s always looking for perception abilities,” Yoichi says, so calmly that it’s chilling.  “But it doesn’t matter what he can or can’t see if he doesn’t know where he needs to be looking.”  He tilts his head, gazes into the open air again.  “Most of the bridges in the city could be toppled from below.  Taking out the center is easier and more efficient, but it’s not the only way.”

Asano picks at his bowl.  “Does he have another demonstration coming up?”

Kyouka sits down next to Oda.

“Not that anybody’s heard about,” Oda says, with a faint smile, reaching over to pat Kyouka’s shoulder before she picks up her chopsticks again.  “Which means he’s scared of risking it again.”

Kudou keeps his voice low.  “Or that he’s concentrating his energy on trying to find us, and he doesn’t see the sense in giving Yoichi another target.”

Yoichi’s head tips the other way.  “He might try it soon, to try to draw me out.  But if there’s no indication of that yet, then—yes.  He’s probably dedicating his forces to trying to track us down.”

Asano leans back, scrubbing one hand over his face.  He rests the heel of the other on the table, his first two yellow-stained fingers extended, with the habitual cigarette-sized gap in between.  “He’s always one step ahead.  This is petty shit.  There’s no fucking point.”

Yoichi straightens up, looking startled at first.

Then his eyes harden.

“That’s not true,” he says.  “None of that is true.”

Inoue sits down.

Nakashima sits down.

“Every single thing you take away from him matters,” Yoichi says.  “He wants everything.  He needs to have complete control.”

Asano gives him a baleful look.  “So the best that we can hope for is pissing him off.  Great news.  Thanks.”

“No,” Yoichi says, leaning forward.  “It’s so much more than that.  It’s so much bigger.  Most of the people he has in the government—most of them he coerced.  A handful supported him once, but they’re starting to see that his benevolence is only for his own benefit, and he’ll dispose of them as soon as they stop being useful.  The rest of them hate him—I’ve seen them.”  He sits back a little, draws a breath, spreads his hands on the table, then twists them together and lowers them into his lap.  “They’re just—afraid.  They’re so afraid.  But when they see you fighting back, they realize that it’s possible.  They realize that he’s not the omniscient god he presents himself to be—that he’s not infallible, and he’s not invulnerable, and they have another choice.”

Asano’s fingers twitch.  “You think some overpaid bootlicking suits are going to lead the revolution?”

“That’s not what he meant,” Kudou says, keeping his voice low.  “What he’s saying is that we have silent support, and the empire isn’t as stable as it looks.  If we can shift the balance far enough for other people to see him falling, we won’t have to bring him down alone.”

Yoichi smiles—at him, first; and then at Asano.

“It’s working,” he says.  “Everything you’ve done.  It’s working.”

Asano stares at him, and then at Kudou.

Then Asano’s eyes narrow, and he jerks his thumb at Yoichi.  “Did you set him up to say that?”

“Yes,” Kudou says, flatly.  “Just to annoy you.”

Asano rolls his eyes, but his shoulders relax.  Underneath the table, Yoichi’s hands unclench.

“If I didn’t know better,” Asano says, “I’d think you were some kind of troublemaker.”

Kudou tries to hide the grimace behind his cup, but it’s too little too late.

As the meal winds down, and the silences stretch longer, it starts to itch at him.  He gets up to leave.  He needs to think—he needs to peel himself away from this for a second.  He needs time and air to assess the choice he made.

There’s no such thing as wrong anymore.  But he needs to evaluate how much of it was a product of impulse instead of intention, and he needs to plan for what might happen next.  If it jeopardizes what they’ve built, and what they need, then—

Bruce’s elbow nudges him.  “Going somewhere?”

Kudou glances at him.

And then at the board.

Dish duty is not objectively random, to avoid pulling people away from more important or more specialized assignments.  He and Bruce only generate it a week at a time, to reduce how often they have to erase names when people die.

It’s strange how you can forget which day it is when you’re focused on the relative moment—how often Wednesday doesn’t matter, but tomorrow changes everything.

Today is Wednesday.  Kudou is washing, Bruce is drying, Oda is canvassing the northwest perimeter, and Nakashima has the southeast.

And the water will be cold.

“Apparently not,” Kudou says.

The dishes are self-explanatory, but the patrols serve a second purpose—people have to get out of here, sometimes.  Human beings can’t live underground.  It wears at you, gnaws at you, whittles you down.  Time loses meaning.  Days blur.  The dark starts to scrape at your skin and eat you away.

Yoichi scans both sections of the chalkboard and slants a glance at Kudou.  “Why am I not listed?”

“The explosives were a higher priority,” Kudou says, “and a better use of your time than me showing you where the stations are.  I’ll take you up tomorrow.”

Yoichi smiles.  “I could have done dishes.”

Bruce claps Yoichi on the shoulder and starts over to the sink.  “Don’t worry.  You’ll get your chance.”

That doesn’t seem to be enough for Yoichi, given that he follows them over to the mountain of bowls and rice-lacquered pots and sauce-streaked pans.  As soon as Bruce has laid towels out across the countertop, he pushes himself up to sit on it, just past the edge of the last one.

“Given that you’re some kind of a genius,” Bruce says to him as Kudou very thoroughly rolls up his sleeves, “I’m pretty sure you can figure it out without a demonstration, so you probably don’t need to stick around.”

Yoichi’s smile tips slightly mischievous.  “Probably not.  But I’d like to get started researching our next target.  And I would imagine that the two of you will be the ones deciding what that is.”

Kudou turns the water on.  “What do you want it to be?”

“‘Want’?” Yoichi says, blinking.  “What I want it to be is the place we grew up.  But if that hellhole is still standing, it wouldn’t be worth the bomb.”  His face creases with a frown.  “I can anticipate his reactions to different scenarios, but I don’t really understand yet what kind of resources any given target would entail.”  He curls his hands around the edge of the counter and swings his feet.  Kudou makes himself concentrate on scrubbing a bowl clean enough to rinse and hand over to Bruce—not on Yoichi’s pale ankles, not on the image of his knees and his hipbones and every contour that Kudou now knows for sure.  “If it’s all the same to you, though, I’d prefer that the next one is less of an obstacle course.”

“Oh, man,” Bruce says, grinning as he leans against the counter, because drying is far faster, and apparently he’s decided to rub it in.  “You mean you didn’t tell him?  Come on, boss.  At least tell him now.”

Kudou passes the next bowl over and sighs.  “Yoichi… The truth is that we’re actually a fitness club.”

Yoichi laughs.  It’s a soft, high, gentle little sound.  Wind through wildflowers, not a bell.

Kudou has never met anyone who is at once so delicate, and so impossibly strong.

“I should have known,” Yoichi says.  “Let me guess—you recruit the most hopeless possible cases, because you love the challenge.”

“Something like that,” Kudou says.

Bruce elbows him.  Hard.  “Hurry it up.  We’re gonna be here all day at this rate.  Who taught you how to wash dishes, a giant tortoise?”

“Your mom,” Kudou says.  “So—yeah, more or less.”

“Excuses,” Bruce says, trying not to laugh and only partially succeeding.  “Come on, what’s the holdup?  You can go faster than this.”

Kudou eyes him, but not for long—he needs to watch his hands, or he’ll break half of their dishes.

It’s a stupid game.

But choosing to act stupidly feels like a relief.

He glowers a little more, and then he puts his head down and scrubs a hell of a lot faster.

Bruce snickers.  Slightly vengefully, Kudou scrapes a bowl clean so fast that some sort of an award committee should be notified.  He slings it at Bruce, who fumbles, almost drops it, manages to catch it in the towel, and snickers a lot harder.

Yoichi politely applauds.

“Eh,” Bruce says, hastily wiping it dry.  “Better.  I guess.”

Kudou eyes him.

He grins again.

For obvious reasons, there isn’t any record of the fastest someone’s ever washed the dishes.

But there should be.  Because Kudou just crushed it.

Bruce almost kept up, but Yoichi started doing passable sports talk radio commentary towards the end, which kept making him laugh.  Kudou feels—too many things.  Slightly giddy, slightly dizzy, slightly distant.  Disconnected.  Unsteady—not quite lost.  He knows exactly where he is.  It’s just never looked like this before.

As they finally move to leave, Yoichi catches his arm and points to the board—the upper half, with the watch times.

Yoichi gives him the same smile as always—no peeking through his eyelashes, no implicative tone.  Kudou hadn’t even realized he was bracing himself for something to change until he feels himself relaxing.

“Can you show me now?” Yoichi asks.  “Just to get a little air.”

Or a little privacy.

Kudou nods.  Bruce holds the door for them, then lets them into the control room so Kudou can retrieve the gauntlets.  He opens the cabinet drawer with the stacks of blades and reloads them.  Running low.  What else is new.

“Don’t stay out too long,” Bruce says.

Yoichi turns.  Kudou doesn’t bother.  “Don’t let the screens rot your brain.”

“You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” Bruce says.

Kudou shuts the door and listens for the latch before he steps away.

He takes Yoichi all the way down the corridor and then up through the final exit, out into the pipe.

Yoichi peers around with that increasingly familiar fascination.  His eyes light on the worn, battered, faded sign next to the reinforced door they just clambered out of: National Water Monitoring Station.

“I wondered where it had all come from,” Yoichi says.  “When did they build it?”

“Start of the last war,” Kudou says, climbing the ladder first.  “Government thought the other side might try to poison the water supply—kill civilians and starve people out.  They tried to repurpose it afterwards, but there’s not much else that requires people to stay down here long enough to need a place to sleep.  One of the guys who used to sell us ammo had worked here for a couple weeks.  Helped us break in and rig it up.”

Yoichi smiles around at the dripping walls, the sluggish current, the rust-speckled ladder rungs.  “It’s nice.”

Kudou snorts.  “Come on.”

When Yoichi has climbed up behind him and paused, waiting for him to move, he listens at the manhole cover, counting down from ten before he nudges it.  He shoves it up just far enough to tip the edge over the lip of the concrete, with a scraping noise like the world splitting.  He waits again.  Listens again.  And then he puts his shoulder into it and levers the whole thing into a slow spiral that wrenches it out of the way.

He climbs up.  He holds both hands out to Yoichi, who takes them one at a time.  Lifting him out is still too easy.

Yoichi crouches next to him to try to help move the cover back into place, and Kudou waves him off.  He’s done this in the gauntlets a thousand times.

“The patrol route goes around the approximate perimeter of the compound,” he says, beckoning Yoichi along with him—not after him, but beside him.  People can disappear from behind your back.  “It’s mostly just to check for new cameras or construction or anything that might help them find us.  Keep an eye on the city.”  He checks around the corner, looking down the alley to the road.  Just the usual sparse distribution of regular people going about their days.  He starts up the stairs carved into the back side of the abandoned restaurant that used to have rooftop seating.  “It’s good to keep people moving, too.  They’re technically free to come and go, but mostly they don’t.  A couple of people used to keep jobs on the side, or had family to take care of.”  They’re all dead now.  Hagino’s mother has dementia.  Kudou tried to tell her that her daughter didn’t hate her—it was that she couldn’t come back.  She never would.  “But the world’s getting smaller as he gets stronger.  It feels safer to most of them to hide.”

They top the roof.  Yoichi bends double, panting to catch his breath.  Kudou watches him for a few seconds—it looks like it hurts.  It looks like it’s straining everything in him.

Kudou reaches out far enough to graze his fingertips over Yoichi’s shoulder, back and forth, until breathing comes a little easier.

“Except me,” Yoichi says, arching an eyebrow at Kudou before he’s even straightened up.  “I’m not free to come and go, because I’m too much of a liability.”

“No,” Kudou says.  “Because you’re too important.”

Yoichi’s eyes narrow slightly.

“He doesn’t care about trucks,” Kudou says.  “He doesn’t care about troops or supplies or the damn bridge.  Money doesn’t matter.  People don’t matter.”  He looks at the sky.  There used to be a little garden here, and tables, and chairs, and music sometimes.  “Except you.  He’s going to tear this city apart for you.  And you’ve just proved that your expertise gives us a kind of power we’ve never had before.  Right now, you’re the most important player to every single member of this fight.”

Yoichi smiles.  “And to you?”

“I’m in it,” Kudou says.  “Aren’t I?”

No answer, at first, except the smile.

But then Yoichi turns, and his gaze flicks across the skyline like he’s measuring it.  Calculating.

“What if,” he says, “we tore the city apart first?”

Something twists in Kudou’s chest.  What if has killed a lot of good people.  Better than him.  Smarter.  Just less careful.

But he’s thought about it.  Of course he has.

“It won’t stop him,” Kudou says.

“Nothing will stop him,” Yoichi says.  “He could eat the world and starve.  But it’ll slow him down.”

Kudou curls his fingers slowly around the levers on the gauntlets, and then slowly releases them again.

“That would require a lot of obstacle courses,” he says.

Yoichi walks up to the edge of the roof, folds his arms, and rests them on the wall.

“Then I guess I’d better learn to run a little faster,” he says.

“You can start now,” Kudou says.  He heads back towards the staircase and checks the bottom, checks their surroundings, checks the closest streets.  “Come on.”

Yoichi grimaces.

But he follows.

“Here I thought we had something special,” he says.  He double-knotted the laces of his borrowed boots.  He’s wearing two pairs of Kudou’s socks.

“We do,” Kudou says.  Voice low.  Scan the ground again.  “I don’t offer high-stakes personal training to just anyone.”

“Lucky me,” Yoichi says, but Kudou can hear the smile.

The circuit takes them back up to the apartment roof.  Oda was scheduled to check this corner, which would have taken her a grand total of four seconds, so Kudou’s not surprised that she’s long gone.

He’s also not surprised that Yoichi moves directly to the wall again, looking out.

There’s still life in this city.  Sometimes that makes it feel harder—the surreality of it.  The world goes on.  Most people barely even care.  They keep their heads down, hide cash under their futons, follow the rules and toe the line and don’t make noise.  Most people are just trying to wait it out.  Most people have no choice—they’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed.  They have families who need them to survive.  The majority of All For One’s hired guns aren’t devotees—they’re ordinary people who couldn’t find any other work.  Most people have to care more about the footing that they’ll have tomorrow than about the scaffold of some future they might never see.

Kudou has this.  A stolen bunker.  A drawer full of knives.  Three minutes of hot water, here and there.

And the strangest person he’s ever met.

Yoichi wraps his arms around himself and tilts his head straight back, staring up at the sky.

Maybe this was what Kudou glimpsed in him, in that first instant, that stayed his hand and then moved it.  Yoichi is exhausted from living, but he isn’t ready to give it up.  His hope is pebbled with grit and gouged with the marks of holding to it with his teeth.  He tries to squeeze the light out of anything he can get his hands around, but he knows how to lie to survive.

Or for something that looks like a ‘greater good’, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Which nets the thought that has been swimming in the back of Kudou’s mind, just below the background noise.  He moves over.  He looks out, and then down.

“What you told them,” he says.  “At the table.”

Yoichi looks at Kudou’s hands.

He reaches over.

He maneuvers both his hands around the gauntlet to wrap them around Kudou’s right.

“Yes,” he says.

“You didn’t lie,” Kudou says.  “But it’s only half true.”

Yoichi tips his head so that his hair slides back out of his eyes, and he can fix them on Kudou’s face.

“Yes,” he says.

“You’re right,” Kudou says, “that we’re making it possible for someone to beat him.”  He tastes the breath.  “But it won’t be us.”

Yoichi grips his hand.

“No,” he says.  “It won’t.”  He smiles.  Sadly.  “But you’ve known that from the start.”  The pad of his thumb smooths slowly over Kudou’s knuckles, one at a time.  “You don’t fight because you believe that you can win.  You fight because you have to try.”

“It’ll have to be someone unbelievable,” Kudou says.  “Someone extraordinary.”

“That’s not why,” Yoichi says, softly.  “That’s not why it can’t be you.”

Kudou shrugs.  He should look out there—out there is where the threats come from, where the end comes from.  The whole world is trying to kill him.  He needs to see it coming.

But there’s something about the way Yoichi’s fingertips settle against his skin.

“Everyone is extraordinary,” Yoichi says.  “That’s one of two things I know for sure.”

It won’t do anyone any damn good to hear it.

But it’s Yoichi.

And Kudou’s voice is not his own.

“What’s the other thing?” he says.

Yoichi turns Kudou’s hand over, cradling it in his.  He slides his index fingertip slowly, slowly along the arc of every line on Kudou’s palm.

“My brother is going to kill you,” Yoichi says.

“No shit,” Kudou says.

Yoichi smiles.  His eyes shine.  He doesn’t raise them from the lines on Kudou’s hand.  “I wish I didn’t know that one.”

“I’d rather know,” Kudou says.  “Anything I know, I can plan for.”

Yoichi looks up this time.  It’s not a green like emerald.  It’s nothing cold and sharp-edged like a gem.  It’s a quiet forest spread around you for miles and miles, sunlit and silent as far as you can see.

“You didn’t plan for me,” he says, “did you?”

Kudou tries to jerk his hand away, but he doesn’t pull hard enough, and Yoichi just laughs.  It shivers through him and then ripples through Kudou, and it hurts more than it helps.

Yoichi lifts Kudou’s hand to his mouth, and his breath grazes Kudou’s knuckles for a long, tingling second before his lips do.  He’s so strangely careful with Kudou’s heavy, scar-tracked, calloused hand.

There’s something wrong with him.

“I’m sorry,” Yoichi murmurs.  “I’m sorry for all of it.”

There’s something wrong with Kudou, too.

“I’m not,” he says.

“Promise me something,” Yoichi says.

Kudou watches him, and waits.

Yoichi looks up from his hand and meets his eyes.  “When he comes for me,” Yoichi says, “leave me behind.  Just run.”

“No,” Kudou says.

Yoichi winces.  His fingers flicker around the base of Kudou’s thumb.  “Please.”

“No,” Kudou says.  “You’re one of us.  You’re not his.”

Yoichi’s mouth curves.  “But I am yours.”

Kudou succeeds in yanking his hand away this time.  “You don’t even know me.”

Yoichi smiles, reaching for his hand again, undeterred when he turns away.  There’s something wrong with him.

“Are you sure?” Yoichi says.

Kudou has never been sure of anything.

He’s just kept moving.

“Come on,” he says.  “It’s never a good idea to stay out too long.”

Yoichi looks over at the camera above the entry door.  They’re just out of view.

“This camera was one of the feeds running in that room downstairs,” he says.

“Can’t have people up here all the time,” Kudou says.  “But if something did happen, by the time someone down there got up here, you’d already be dead.”

Yoichi nods distractedly.  “No, I know.  I was thinking more along the lines of cannibalizing additional cameras off the drones.  But getting them wired up to the screens when they’re designed to broadcast signal back to a different central hub would be a nightmare.  Maybe we could steal more cameras from somewhere else.  He loves cameras, because seeing everything makes him feel like he knows everything.”

That’s what’s coming.

Vengeance.

They stole his prize, and they wounded his pride.  They showed him his own weakness.

“You can plot more camera theft downstairs,” Kudou says, beckoning him forward.  Always better to have eyes on him.  Always better to know precisely where he is.  “Come on.”

Yoichi comes.

When they step inside, and the door latch clunks into place behind them, Kudou catches hold of Yoichi’s arm and presses him back against the wall.  He sweeps the draping bangs out of Yoichi’s eyes, traces the lines that bracket the tireless smile, and then hooks one arm around the back of his neck and kisses him, hot and sharp for a second before pulling away.

“Cameras won’t save us,” Kudou says.

Yoichi’s eyes are bright.  “We’ll save ourselves,” he says.

He knows how to lie to survive.

“Something like that,” Kudou says.

Back down below, his stalwart support team doesn’t even give him time to sit down.

“Field trip,” Bruce says.

“Can I have five minutes?” Kudou says.

He knows the answer—it’s best to go now, right before the stalls close, when the vendors will discount all the things that they don’t want to carry back.  Their supply stocks are running low enough to make it verge on urgent, and the last time that the enemy would expect Kudou to show his face in public is immediately after staging a massive successful assault.  They’ll expect him to be holed up tight, licking his wounds and resting on his laurels.

Security presence will be stronger, though—or at least more obviously positioned—to convince the terrified public that they have everything under control.

“Nope,” Bruce says.  “Now.”

Asano shakes his head mournfully.  “Middle management blows.”

“I’m not managing anything,” Kudou says.

“Go manage to get a coat,” Bruce says.

Kudou looks at him.

Bruce grins.  “Please.  Boss.  Mr. In-Charge Man.”

Kudou does manage not to strangle him.

With the warehouse raids, they always focus on nonperishables.  Bruce likes to call it liberating the oppressed rice supply.  They save up the income from the apartments and whatever corpses’ pockets they have time to empty, and sell the stuff they don’t need, and most of the time they can stretch the money far enough for ammo and whatever meat is cheap at the market on account of low demand.

Produce too.  Oda occasionally aspires to vegetarianism.  She points out that there are no domesticated animals whatsoever in the enemy’s employ, in contrast to the people, and suggests that it isn’t unreasonable to offer some kind of a reward for their solidarity.  Asano usually asks her at that point if she’s proposing cannibalism or punishing plants, and she usually finds something to throw at him.

Kudou and Bruce canvas the market separately, then liaise in the middle to compare notes.  They split the money, casually hit the stalls they chose, make a precisely modulated minimum of unremarkable smalltalk, and then reconvene at the outskirts with the bags.

They’ve got just enough left over to pop into the run-down konbini at the corner and buy Asano a pack of cigarettes.  Nakashima has a sweet tooth and a soft spot for cheap mochi.  Oda’s convenience store vice is bubblegum.  Inoue always wants a newspaper, no matter how bad the news gets.  Kyouka likes chocolate.

Kudou makes himself think of them as incentives, not consolations.  All of them are grown adults who chose this life, just like he did.  If it’s a mistake for them to be here, those are their mistakes, not his.

His eye catches on a row of packets of flavored instant coffees—overpriced, for their size, with metallic foil labels.  They don’t have anything with raspberry, but he tosses a mocha-flavored one into his basket.

Bruce’s elbow nudges his arm.  Bruce’s head tips up and towards the left, guiding Kudou’s gaze to the TV mounted on the wall above the cash register.  The clerk is leaning against the counter with his arms folded, watching the newscaster warn the public to be on the lookout for the dangerous terrorist thought to be responsible for this morning’s unconscionable attack.

It’s Kudou, of course.

A drone camera caught him glancing around the corner of one of the buildings that they sheltered behind, body rigid and pistol raised.  It must have been early on—he hadn’t lost the baseball cap yet.  They only have a few frames of footage, which jerk like stop-motion to depict him noticing the camera, ducking a spray of bullets, and then starting to lift his arm.  They cut it before he fires back.

They hold a freeze-frame that’s mostly in focus as the announcer’s voice tells the concerned citizenry to report any information they might have about the suspect or any unusual activity that they’ve seen.  Cash reward.

The person on the screen doesn’t even look like him.

That person looks powerfully confident and perilously calm.

Kudou stares up at the grainy, fuzzy impression of his own face on the screen.  The news anchor’s measured voice fades away.  It doesn’t look like him.  It does.  This feels unreal.  Everything he’s done, the life he’s lived, the world he’s had—none of it seems possible, in that instant.  None of it ever happened.

The shopkeep starts ringing them up, but he sees the direction of Kudou’s gaze and glances up at the screen again.  “Nasty business, huh?”

“Yeah,” Kudou says.  “What an asshole.”

Bruce coughs hard into his hand to cover how he’s choking on a laugh.

Staying out raises the odds of running into an ambitious curfew patrol, but fewer trips reduces the odds of capture overall.  Kudou’s turning into a mathematician.

Saitou looks both ways, locks the door behind them, pulls the shades, and slots the Closed sign into place before she ushers them into the back of the antiques shop.  “Nice work today.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kudou says.

“Me neither,” she says.  “The usual?”

Kudou glances at Bruce.

Bruce folds his arms, shrugs, and smiles.  “Can you double it?”

She pauses, looking up from dropping boxes into the backpack to eye him.  “Can you afford it?”

“Probably not,” Bruce says.

She eyes him for another second, then eyes Kudou, then looks down at the bag.

“Big damn heroes with small damn budgets,” she says.  “Don’t make me regret this, all right?”

“We could make a shout-out,” Bruce says, innocently.  “While we’re using them, you know, pause and give credit where it’s due.”

She slams the first backpack against his folded arms, and he fumbles to catch it and hold it to his chest.

“Eat me,” she says.

“Would that improve the discount?” Bruce asks.

He probably deserves to get a shotgun shell pitched at his forehead.

They snagged a parking spot close to the market because some of the stall owners had already shuttered up and left, taking their delivery vans with them.

Their departure isn’t so simple.

They pack up the truck and try to cut out onto a sidestreet, but the road backs up, and there are metal barricades set up to block off all of the alternate routes.

Traffic stop.

Bruce tips down the sun visor to extract one of Asano’s masterpieces of forgery.  They have a rule against storing paperwork in the glove compartment, because it’s full of guns.

Bruce’s driver’s license is the genuine article, because they couldn’t replicate the plastic of the card with any printer they had access to.  He taps the corner against the steering wheel and sighs.  “You ready?”

Kudou watches another car creep through the checkpoint.  “Are you?”

Bruce half-smiles.  “I asked first.”

Kudou slouches in his seat and finger-combs his hair back from his face.  “I’m always ready.”

Bruce exhales, pulls forward cautiously, and squares his shoulders.  “Showtime.”

The last car ahead of them gets waved on and scuds off down the street.

Bruce turns a tired smile on the window and rolls it down.

“Good afternoon,” he says.  “Or is it evening?  I feel like we’re right in between.”

The cop doesn’t look impressed as he extends a hand.  “License and—”

“Here you go!” Bruce says, bobbing his head in a half-bow as he holds them out.

The cop glances down at the fake registration, then over at the body of the truck.  “Is this a government vehicle?”

Bruce blinks at him.  “Huh?”  He blinks harder, then relaxes.  “Oh, you mean those trucks they’ve got all over the place—right?”  He follows the direction of the cop’s gaze, even as the cop starts eyeing him again instead.  “It does look a lot like ’em, doesn’t it?  Maybe it used to be.  We haul a lot of furniture, and our old one just—” He makes an incomprehensible gesture.  “—kaput, so when we saw the ad for this baby, we snatched her right up.”

The cop thrusts the paper and his license back at him.  “What are you transporting?”

Kudou feels very cold and very calm.  He reaches back, mutters when he has to flail around to grab a hold of a bag handle, and then winces as he hauls one up.

“Cabbage,” he says, lifting it up for emphasis.  “And…” He sets it down on the center console and shoves things around.  “There were carrots.  Did they get our carrots?  If they shorted us again—”

“You look familiar,” the cop says, slowly.

There’s a pause.

And then Bruce starts laughing, leans over, and elbows Kudou hard.

“Go on,” Bruce says, delightedly.

“I hate you,” Kudou says.  He turns to the cop, making a point of taking a weary deep breath.  “You local?”

“Yeah,” the cop says, eyes narrowing.

“Figured,” Kudou says.  “So—okay.  So—when I was twenty, my job cut me, and I needed cash.  So I did—please don’t laugh.  I did this commercial.  For the MSI Travel Agency.  They went under, but it—okay.  Does this ring a bell?”  He smooths his hair back with both hands and holds it down against his head, clearing his forehead and slimming the shape of his face, and puts on his single sleaziest smile—all teeth and dissolution.

This is how this guy will remember him.

The cop leans in, then stares, then squints, then grimaces.

“Nah,” he says.  “Guess maybe it’s one of those things where I don’t remember that I remember it.”

Kudou drops his head into his hands.  “Yeah.  It was a long time ago.”

“Right,” the cop says.  He clears his throat and claps a hand on the windowsill.  “You gents have a good night.  Be careful out there.”

“We will!” Bruce says brightly.  “Thank you, sir!”

The cop steps back.  Bruce eases his foot down onto the gas.  They pull away.

Kudou reaches out to steady the steering wheel while Bruce peers into the side mirror to check if the cop is jotting down their plates.

“Clear,” Bruce says, sitting up straight to take the wheel again.  “MSI claims another victim.”

Kudou presses his lips together to stop the smile.  “Shut up.”

“I’m just saying,” Bruce says.  “I would’ve traveled a lot more if you’d been the one selling me those sweet package deals.”

Kudou turns the smile towards the window.  “Pretty sure I told you to shut up.”

“Pretty sure my dream vacation awaits,” Bruce says.

He’s already had ammunition thrown at him today, to minimal effect, but Kudou seriously considers trying a carrot for good measure.

The enriched dinner fare raises spirits—or maybe that’s the victory.  Maybe it’s both.  Doesn’t matter much.

Oda has a bottomless cache of stories from all the electrical work she did topside.  Kudou’s favorite might be the guy she thought was luring her into a sex den only to reveal an entire room of rare Pokémon cards.  She always says she regrets not marrying him on the spot.

At least Bruce hasn’t put Kudou on dishes twice in one day, possibly out of respect for the broad cultural impact of his travel agency ads.  He slips away when the conversation has soothed the group enough not to notice his absence, and goes to the control room.

He checks all the screens as a matter of habit.  Everything looks still.

Then he starts digging, and then he starts dividing, and then he starts printing.

He has to move a low two-drawered cabinet out of the way to clear enough wall space to reassemble the puzzle of tiled printer paper sheets into its intended purpose as a massive city map.

He drags the cabinet partway across the floor and sits down on top of it, looking at the world flattened out on the wall, a spiderweb of streets stretching greedy filaments all the way to the ceiling.  He turns the roll of tape over in his hands for a few minutes, tracking the ways the roads flow into each other, following the snaking curves of the canal.

Then he gets up, crosses over to Bruce’s cup of pens, and picks out all of the felt-tipped ones.

He marks the truck routes, first, in one color—the supply routes to the warehouses that Oda has painstakingly plotted out, the patrol perimeters that they know of, the police stations that the enemy has infiltrated or slowly taken over.  Then he outlines the warehouses themselves, and jots down the notes of what they know—number of guards, number of employees, what’s stored there, how often it’s resupplied.  One by one.

He marks out the roadblocks and checkpoints and train stations, and the places where security forces tend to congregate—the strongholds and choke points—as well as the otherwise unremarkable areas that they monitor closely, like the market.

Part of the enemy’s advantage is that All For One has quietly brought so much of the government to its knees that he functionally puppeteers them from behind the scenes.  The smaller civic buildings don’t matter—those people have too little influence to be worth coercing into compliance.  The enemy sniffs out power and sinks his teeth into it.  He probably owns all of the security at the courthouse.  He’s functionally taken the Cabinet offices hostage.  Damaging a major government building would be unmissable, but the risk of failure or of injuring potential future allies would ultimately outweigh the benefit.  Kudou rings those in a different color.

The enemy himself never operates out of any given penthouse for particularly long anymore.  Considering the size of his retinue, it’s frankly impressive that he can relocate so quickly and so quietly so often.  Kudou wonders if he uses some sort of stolen meta ability for it—cloaks them under unnatural cover; masks their shapes; muffles their steps.

Doesn’t matter how.  Only matters that they force him to keep doing it.  Only matters if they can scare him, just this once.

He’s so damn skilled at secrecy that they only know of a few of his favorite haunts.  Yoichi should be able to identify more.  Kudou draws sharp-cornered blue ink squares around the ones that they’ve tracked him to before.

He marks the stoplights that have traffic cameras.  He marks the parking garages, the construction sites, and the new chain-link fence they came across today.  He marks the facility that most of the drones launch from.  He marks out the few places they have allies, and the grocery stores, and the nexuses of the power grid.

He writes notes—all the information he can remember, and all the details he can think of.

He retreats back to the cabinet, sits down, and looks it over.

And over.

And gets up, and makes additions, and sits back down, and looks again.

And again.

He doesn’t know how much later it is that he hears the knock.

He does know who it is.  Bruce just lets himself in.  Nakashima knocks like a butterfly; Asano knocks like a herd of elephants.  Oda always tries the handle first, not because she expects it to give but because she’s testing to make sure the electronics of the lock are working.  Hagino used to do a pattern, almost like a song.

Yoichi’s is a brisk, even rhythm—sharp, with the edges of his knuckles—that somehow sounds inquisitive instead of demanding.

Kudou is already opening the door before he realizes that he still has the marking pens clutched in his hand.  Yoichi is already smiling at him by the time he moves the door enough to see it.

“I thought you’d be sleeping,” Yoichi says.

Kudou steps back to admit him.  “Why aren’t you?”

Yoichi sidles in and pushes the door firmly shut before he shrugs, shooting Kudou a meaningful look.

Yeah.  Hell of a day.

And at the same time—

Less hellish than it’s felt in longer than he can place.

Yoichi’s gaze slides over to the wall, and his eyes widen.

“Oh,” he says.  “Interesting.”

Kudou sits down on the cabinet again and gestures wordlessly.

Yoichi wanders over to the wall, hands folded behind his back with his fingers tangled loosely.  He’s recovered his regular pants, but he’s still wearing Kudou’s shirt.

He examines the map for long enough that Kudou thinks he could probably drive a cab around the city and make decent money.

Then Yoichi wanders back over to Kudou and hikes himself up onto the top of the cabinet.  He sits close enough that their hips touch.  He wraps both hands around Kudou’s, and his fingers stroke lightly back and forth.

Then he plucks the blue pen out of the stack of them in Kudou’s fist.

He jumps down.

He crosses back to the wall.

“I used to beg him, at the start,” Yoichi says, voice almost dreamlike.  Distant.  “Begged him not to kill people.  Not to destroy them.”  He tips his head back, looking up, then down again, back and forth.  “I tried to stop him.  Tried to hurt him.  Tried to get in the way.”

He uncaps the pen and draws a neat square around one building.

And then another.

And another.

And another.

“I’m done begging,” he says.

Kudou gets up and goes to join him by the map.  The blue ink seeps into the paper.

Kudou tightens his grip on the other pens and glances over at the bright eyes half-curtained by the pale hair.  “You ready to tear a city apart?”

Yoichi turns—clear-eyed, unhesitating.  His mouth quirks with the shadow of a smile.  “Yes,” he says.  The smile tips the left corner of his mouth higher.  “Are you?”

Kudou looks at the map.  He tracks the pathways, the roadways, the clusters of apartments, the parks, the shortcuts—the veins and arteries and capillaries of the place he has to bleed out to try to save.

“I’m always ready,” he says.

They don’t exactly have a savings account to fund the materials for manufacturing demolitions-grade explosives in a basement.  They up the ante on the warehouse raids—darting in and going directly for the tech supplies and the munitions.  Anything Yoichi can’t scavenge, they can sell.  Anything they can’t sell isn’t in the enemy’s hands anymore.

Kudou puts Yoichi on the dishwashing board.  Kudou drags him up to the roof of the apartment building at least twice a day, watching the streets while he watches the sky.  Kudou gets used to seeing the notebooks on his desk, the dip in the bed, another towel crowning his laundry pile. 

He gets unused to waking up alone.

The enemy starts anticipating their tactics.  Even trying to twist their normal strategies inside-out and backwards to stay unpredictable, everyone involved is aware, now, that they’re targeting the weapons stores, and the way the warehouses bristle with guards is no surprise.  They have a couple of close scrapes—a bullet clips the outside of Asano’s bicep, which bleeds like hell but doesn’t do any permanent damage.  A strike force gets up onto the roof where Oda’s keeping watch, with her pupils still dilated to dangerous proportions from using her meta ability.  She barely manages to clamber down the side of the building and huddle on someone’s balcony until Bruce can come extract her.  A particularly ambitious guard rams the butt of his rifle so hard into Kudou’s chest that it cracks a rib even through the kevlar.

Yoichi looks stricken at the bandages and the exhaustion.  He promises that they’ve accumulated everything he needs to finish a first round, maybe a second.  He doesn’t say the word revenge out loud.

Kudou surfaces blurrily from a dream to find his entire right arm pins-and-needles numb because Yoichi is lying on top of it, clinging to it like a child with a favorite toy.  Kudou buys stupid mocha coffee packets at the konbini.  Kudou tells him, once, too late at night for it to feel consequential, what life was like before—how terrifying it was, in the beginning, just putting up posters and stickers on bus stop windows and train station walls out of sheer frustration.  How hard it was to try to foster any sort of substantial resistance out of a third-floor apartment in a middling neighborhood.  How the first gun he ever fired was point-blank into a cop’s guts, because it was him or the stranger, and he made his choice.

There was no before, for Yoichi.

There was no choice.

His fingertips always walk so gently up Kudou’s chest, his arms, his throat, his thighs.  They still pause on the scars, still sweep around them, still circle the bruises.  The cracked rib burns with every single breath.

Yoichi doesn’t say tomorrow out loud either.  He doesn’t talk about a future any further out than the deployment of the next set of bombs.  He doesn’t make any promises, or any apologies.

There’s something wrong with him.

And this is exactly where he belongs.

It was after the second day of the latest project that Kudou started periodically letting himself into the workshop, to drag Yoichi away from the mounds of electronic innards and containers of who-knows-what and out into the sunlight—and sometimes the drizzle.  Yoichi had protested that this new set wouldn’t take as long as the first ones.  Kudou had explained that his mind is far too important to lose to bunker-cabin fever.

The enemy has caught on enough to outlaw making unofficial copies of architectural documents, which means that Inoue is now the one who goes to city hall and pores over the building plans and permits and schematics.  He comes back and reproduces the blueprints in painstaking detail, one line at a time.  He’s always said that using Retention makes his head hurt, but he keeps at it for hours.

Oda and Kyouka watch the different targets to ID the major players—and the maintenance employees, the janitors, and the service-people.  Kyouka tracks down the stores that supply their uniforms.

Nakashima used to work at one of the libraries they closed, which is part of why she can find a book on anything in nearly no time at all.  She goes to the last big library that’s still open, which is state-owned and closely monitors the books that people borrow.  She spends several hours sampling romance novels before she cherry-picks a selection on pyrotechnics and rocket propulsion and military weapon history, which she throws out the window of the bathroom to collect from the alley as she leaves.

Kudou’s surprised to find out that he can fall asleep to the sound of pages turning.

He’s slightly less surprised to wake up again, sometime later, to Yoichi’s nose nudging up the side of his neck, Yoichi’s breath ghosting across his throat, Yoichi’s cool fingertips sliding under his shirt and trailing meaningfully up his chest.  They carefully avoid the part that’s achingly tender from the rib.

Kudou squints at him in the faint half-light of the flashlight he was reading by, which he set down on the desk.  “Please tell me,” Kudou says, “that this isn’t because bombs make you horny.”

Yoichi grins against his jaw, kisses it, laughs softly, kisses it again.  “Would it help if I said it was the knowledge?”

He draws back and shifts his weight to sling himself up on top of Kudou, straddling his hips.  He leans down to press his forehead to Kudou’s, their eyelashes tangling as he blinks slowly, and his mouth curls, and he breathes against Kudou’s lips.

“Would it help,” he says, “if I said it was the power?”

Kudou looks at him.  His eyes are deeply tired and searingly warm.  Kudou settles one hand on each of Yoichi’s thighs, spreading his fingers, savoring it for a second before he meets Yoichi’s smile with an arched eyebrow.

“I think we’re past help,” he says.

“Oh?” Yoichi says.  He starts rolling Kudou’s shirt up, rocking his hips back as he leans down to taste the skin as he uncovers it.  “Should I stop?”

Kudou raises one hand to thread it into the flood of silky hair.  “Don’t you dare.”

As Kudou is standing up to leave the lunch table the next day, Asano catches his eye and jerks his head up and westward—towards the apartment roof.  Kudou gives him a fraction of a nod.

Since apparently this conversation is private, Kudou takes his time helping to stack the dishes for Oda and Yoichi, in order to give Asano a few minutes to go up ahead of him.

He doesn’t know what to expect, but he wouldn’t change any of the choices that he’s made, and speculation won’t change what Asano wants to say.

He checks the cameras before he goes.  Asano isn’t pacing back and forth across the roof.  He’s standing very still and calmly lighting a cigarette.

You move quick if you move at all.  Asano hasn’t made much progress before Kudou makes it up.

He holds out the cigarette to Kudou, smoke leaking through his grin before he blows it from his nose instead.

Kudou waves it away, like Asano knew he would.  Overcast again.  No rain yet, but he can smell it.

“We used to play up here,” Asano says.  He gestures with the cigarette, and the smoke follows slowly, like a hazy afterimage of his intent.  “Me and my sister.  My mom would run clotheslines from the door, and people would hang their stuff up, and we’d run around playing hide-and-seek and shit.  It was like a maze.”

There are still a few rusted hooks driven in above the door.

Kudou folds his arms and leans against the wall.  He looks down at the street.  There’s only one person moving—a man walking quickly with his head down, clutching his briefcase.  Trying to get home.

If Asano has something to say, he’ll say it.

He’s probably not leaving.  He’s been with them almost since the beginning.  He’s seen the worst of it and stayed.

Everybody has a price.  Everybody has a breaking point.  But it’s unlikely that this is his.  It’s more likely that he just wants to be heard.

So Kudou waits.  There’s never time to lose.  That’s what makes giving it to people matter so much.

Asano takes a long drag off the cigarette and then tips his head so far back that it almost looks grotesque.  He blows the narrow stream of smoke into the sky.

“You know,” he says.  “I wish you’d asked me to be your end-of-days desperation bed-warmer.”

Kudou’s guts clench.  He keeps his voice level.  “You’re straight.”

“Well, yeah,” Asano says.  “But just because I’d decline the dance doesn’t mean I don’t want to be asked.”

Kudou looks at him.

He looks back.

He takes another drag off of the cigarette.

He shrugs.

“Fine,” Kudou says.  “Would you like to be my end-of-days desperation bed-warmer?”

“Hell, no,” Asano says.  “You should fuck that weird ghost-pale savant guy who’s in love with you.”

Kudou stares at him.

Asano grins around the cigarette.  “See?  Aren’t you glad we had this talk?”

“No,” Kudou says.  He breathes out.  He starts for the door.  He stops just long enough to grip Asano’s shoulder for a second before he lets go.  “Don’t stay too long.”

“Aye-aye,” Asano says.  “Give him a hickey from me.”

“Shut up,” Kudou says, but Asano will be able to hear that he’s smiling.

Kudou passes Oda in the hall.  She claps him on the shoulder—with a wet hand—and openly winks.  He stops walking and stares after her, more to make a point than a difference.

She laughs and keeps walking.

He runs the kettle in his room, fills the mug, and brings the rest with him.  If it was him, he would ration every stupid mocha-flavored powder packet—pour exactly half into the cup, stir it up, and smell it for longer than he spent drinking it, imagining what it would taste like in detail before he swallowed a sip.

Last time, Yoichi dumped the whole packet in and insisted that they share it.

The workshop door doesn’t lock at all, let alone with a scanner, because hardly anyone has ever used it before.  Kudou keeps his eyes on the mug of steaming water as he backs in through the doorway.  Can’t afford a bad burn anywhere, least of all on his hands.

Yoichi is already smiling at him when he looks up.

And then Yoichi’s coming towards him, and wrapping both hands around his around the mug, and meeting his eyes for too long as the steam uncoils between them.

“You shouldn’t have,” Yoichi says.

Kudou shifts, draws back, and crosses over to set the mug down next to the splattering of electronic entrails monopolizing the scarred, char-marked tabletop.  He draws the packet out of his pocket and holds it out.  Yoichi’s eyes light up.

Kudou shouldn’t have done a lot of things.

Yoichi takes it, then shoves tangles of wires and the other arcane scraps of scavenged tech aside, hopping up to sit on the edge of the table in the newly-emptied space.  He tussles with the tab on the packet to pull it open.  “Split it with me?” he says.

Kudou looks down at the mess on the tabletop until Yoichi grins and sweeps another section out of the way, clearing him a makeshift seat.  He levers himself up into it.  Yoichi scoots over until their knees touch.  Kudou reaches over and collects the mug, offering it out for Yoichi to pour the powder into, and a fine film of wayward dust speckles his hands.

Yoichi takes up the chopstick and stirs, rhythmically, watching the water swirl.  “You’re not worried about being surrounded by in-progress explosives?”

“Not as dangerous as being topside,” Kudou says.  “And topside doesn’t have you.”

The smile puts stars in his eyes.  Sunbeams in the forest.  Glimmers off lakewater, sparks of lightning heralding the rain.  Some stupid romantic nonsense like that.  Words have never bought Kudou anything he needed.

Kudou crumples the foil and gives him the mug.

Yoichi slips the first two fingers of his right hand through the handle and lifts it to his lips.  He closes his eyes.  He breathes in.  He smiles.

It’s enough.

This is enough.

They sink a ferry that the enemy had used to move vehicles back and forth between the islands.  They bring down another bridge.  They hit one of his best-hidden storehouses, which Yoichi was able to locate.  They burn out half of the factory that makes the drones.

Yoichi picks one of the hotels that he stays in, stations troops in, and stores more records in.  Oda spends two days surveilling to confirm that he’s not there now, but a hell of a lot of valuable officers and documents are.

“Extraction point here.”  Kudou circles it on the map.

Bruce looks at him, shifting so slightly that no one else will read it in the angle of his shoulders.

Their ground rule is to park the truck a minimum of a half-mile from the site—further when it’s a major target, and they’ll be bringing rubble down.  Bruce won’t contest it in front of the team, but he knows Kudou is pushing their luck by putting it closer.

They’ve been hitting target after target, bullseye after bullseye, and the cracks are widening.  Bruce was right, before.  The enemy is scared of them.  It’s to their advantage to dart in quick and disappear faster than ever.

And it’s easier on Yoichi, if the journey back is shorter.

He’s the one holding this up.

Yoichi keeps the smile on and his posture relaxed in front of the rest of them, but Kudou sees the coughing fits that rack him hard enough to shake him like a ragdoll and spring tears every time he has to run too far to make a rendezvous.  Kudou hears the way his breaths wheeze out of him like they don’t want to leave his lungs.

Everyone ratifies the plan.

Six stories up, Kudou looks at the sliding glass door on the wall on the opposite side of the alleyway.  Sun glances off the glass, gleaming like a lighthouse.  No chairs on the balcony.  No shades on the window.  The metal casing of the panel is painted beige, but it’s exactly the right size, in exactly the right place.

Oda will be up on the highest rooftop near the truck by now.  Kudou raises the radio and jams the button down.  “Talk to me.”

Static spits, but her voice cuts through.  “You’re clear, boss.”

“Copy,” he says.  He turns off the radio and clips it back onto his belt.

He adjusts his grip on the rope, loosening the first loop, and gauges the distance one more time.  That’s all they can afford.  The coast never stays clear for long.

He steps into the momentum and throws, hurling the grapple across the gap between the building they’re standing in and the taller one that looms across the alleyway.

Just before the iron hook strikes steel, he snatches it out of its own trajectory with Gear Shift and whips it around the railing of the balcony, twirling it enough times to secure it well, and then tucks the hook in against a decoration in the metal.  He yanks on the rope to cinch it tight.

Hesitate, and you’re dead.

He slings the crowbar over the top of the rope, grips both ends, and jumps.

He has to look down, because he needs to know if anyone’s looking back.

Empty alleyway; lurch of his stomach; wrench of the velocity carrying him towards a metal railing with a healing rib.

He gets his boots out ahead of him just in time for them to take the force of the collision.  He doesn’t give himself a chance to second-guess—he lets go of the crowbar with his right hand and reaches for the railing in the same second that he starts to fall.

He catches it.

That’s Asano’s cue to cut the line and book it—and to bring Yoichi with him, willing or not.

Kudou hikes himself up over the railing and onto the balcony, landing as quietly as he can and crouching low.  The hallway inside looks empty for now.  He unfastens the rope, coils it up, shoves it into his tool bag, and creeps over to the exterior wall—where an enterprising and extraordinarily shortsighted architect had insisted that an electrical panel should be placed, to preserve the minimalist aesthetic of the interior.

Oda worked on the wiring when this place was built.  She was thrilled to see it on the list.

Two strikes with the crowbar breaks the puny padlock, and swinging the door open reveals exactly what she told him to expect—a vast array of circuits, most of them labeled with the function or the area that they support.

Oda also knows which security system they installed.  She knows that in the event of a power failure, it will take three and a half minutes to come back online after the generator kicks in.

As it happens, there is going to be a power failure right…

Now.

Kudou takes out the sledgehammer, grips the short rubber-wrapped handle, swings it high, and slams the head of it into the heart of the panel.

The whole thing fountains yellow sparks.

He hears popping noises like gunshots from within—and shouting, as all the lights go dark.

He jams the hammer back into his backpack and whips out one of the trash bags, sidling close to peer through the glass of the door.  No visible movement in the hall in either direction.  He hauls it open, slips through, and shoves it shut behind him.

Footsteps, running.

He darts over to the closest trashcan, shakes out the bag, and stops there, dropping his shoulders, staring around himself with his mouth open and his eyes wide.

The guard who comes thundering around the corner into the corridor snarls at him without breaking stride.  “Are you an idiot?  Evacuate!  Now!”

Kudou jumps and starts nodding vigorously.  “Yes, sir.”

The guard doesn’t spare him another glance, continuing down the hall to answer one summons or another, and Kudou scuttles off towards the stairs, his backpack, his radio, and his oversized uniform all going utterly unnoticed.  Those with power prefer not to pay any more attention than strictly necessary to the people who actually hold their society up out of the mud.

Kudou takes the stairs two and three at a time, counting down in his head, gripping the banister when his momentum carries him too far.  His heart never descends from the back of his throat.  He forces himself to breathe around it, forces his feet to move.  They won’t get a second chance.

He slings himself around the last turn to the foot of the stairs on the ground floor and hurls himself at the door emblazoned with the words Emergency Exit: Alarm Will Sound.  Miscalculation—the shoulder that he throws into the crashbar is the same side as the rib he cracked.  It slams his own elbow into the bruise.

But he gets the door open.

And Asano shoves Yoichi in through it before sidestepping in after, the bulging bag cradled in one arm.

Asano has an overcoat on, to hide his kevlar while they waited.  Yoichi isn’t wearing any kevlar at all—it’s too heavy for him, tires him out and slows him down.  Speed is likelier to save him.

Kudou leads the way down the staircase to the basement, still at a run—the enemy might put it together that locking down the building instead of evacuating it could trap the culprits inside.  It would still be a risk—they can’t know if this time Kudou sent fanatics who would be ready to blow themselves up for the cause—but they will have noticed the same figures in every frame of drone footage by now.  All For One knows who’s doing this.  All For One knows exactly who to blame.

Not much time.

Kudou flings open the door at the bottom, looking both ways down the hall before accepting one of the bombs from Asano.  Kudou doesn’t wait for him to fish the second out of the bag to pass to Yoichi—no time.  As he moves, he tries to overlay the schematic in his mind on the hallway ahead of him.  This hall opens on the left—take that corridor all the way down to the end; alcove on the right will have a fire door to a maintenance closet.  He’ll lay the bomb in the center of the floor.  He’ll prime it.  He’ll activate the fan overhead, which will help usher the force and the flames through the entire ventilation system of the building, when it comes to that.

Simple.

They plotted it out so that everyone would reconvene at the base of the stairwell at approximately the same time, accounting for the complexity of the placement and the speed of the delivery.  Yoichi and Asano reappear from their respective directions at almost precisely the same moment Kudou does.  Maybe luck is on their side for once.

Asano adjusts the bag over his shoulder, empty now except for the detonator.  Back up the stairs.

There’s a guard at the exit door now.  He turns as they top the stairs, eyes narrowing, and reaches for something on this belt.

Kudou hauls Yoichi with him and shoves open the door leading to the ground floor hallway instead, hearing Asano on his heels.

The erstwhile occupants of the building are jostling around each other out here, clustering near the front doors, clamoring for explanations and shoving at each other.  Kudou drags Yoichi and Asano directly into the crowd.

He’s counting on the chaos to cover them.

He’s counting on a lot of things.

Someone shouts, glass shatters, and people start pouring out through the broken front window, which eases the bottleneck but heightens the havoc.  People rush out through it, tumbling over each other, and blood streaks the jutting teeth of the remaining glass.  Several people are screaming—the noise reverberates in the narrow hallway, doubling back on itself on top of the panicked ruckus that envelops them.

Kudou grips Yoichi’s arm.  Asano will shove past anyone he has to.

The crowd shifts, swells, sinks, ripples, parts—

Kudou hauls on Yoichi’s arm and drives them directly into the temporary gap.  He can see the front doors.  Like hell is he letting Yoichi near that window.

He senses more than he sees that someone’s reaching for them.  It’s the shadow, or the air, or an instinct.

He twists and smacks the outstretched hand out of the way, hard—makes split-second eye contact with a different startled guard, whose gaze flicks to Yoichi and then back to him, and then—

The crowd seals up behind them like the surface of the ocean, churning wildly, and he drags Yoichi in ahead of the next wave.

Ten strides to the door—eight, seven—someone stumbles, flailing out for anything to grab onto, and Kudou shoulders them aside.

There’s one rule to running.

You don’t look back.

You never look back.

Kudou grabs onto the doorframe with his free hand, hip-checking another idiot out of the way, and glances past Yoichi.

Asano is two steps behind them.  He grabs the crisp-suited shoulder of the man in between them, skin brightening and arm subtly growing in his sleeve as he calls up his meta ability.  He flings the guy out of the way.

Asano is one step behind them.

Kudou pulls Yoichi out the door, down the steps, into the road—

The crowd thins rapidly, but most of them haven’t fled far enough from the building.  They’re going to die.

Kudou loosens his grasp just enough to slide his fingers down and catch Yoichi’s hand instead.  Yoichi bruises easily.  It’s probably too late to avoid it this time, after the sea of sharp shoulders and elbows on top of the intensity of Kudou’s grip, but he doesn’t have to make it worse.

They designated a sidestreet in advance.  He can hear Asano’s footsteps.  He scans ahead of them; Asano will watch their backs; Yoichi’s fingers curl tight around his.

They duck around the corner.  Kudou releases Yoichi’s hand, drops his backpack, and strips off the coveralls.  If anyone in that building has half a brain, they’ll be telling the cops to watch for workers who run too far.

If anyone in that building has half a brain, they’ll be halfway to the basement.

Asano carefully lifts the detonator out of his bag and passes it into Yoichi’s waiting hands.  Kudou kicks the clothes into a pile and clips the radio back onto his belt.  He flicks it on.

And immediately taps into a stream of chaos.

“—found it, Kudou, we had to bail—we’re coming towards you—”

He snatches it off his belt again and presses the input button.  “Repeat that.”

Bruce is running.  Harsh breaths, static, interference.  “They clocked the truck—must’ve finally picked up the plates—they—”

Gunfire, and the line cuts.

Kudou doesn’t breathe.

The radio crackles.

“Fuck,” Bruce gasps out.  “They—we’re heading for you—they’ve got the canal blocked.  Move deeper in—we’ll find you.  Hole up in the old place and give us ten minutes, then fucking run.”

Kudou grips the button.  “Got it.  Move.”

Asano grits his teeth.  He glances at the road, glances at the sky.

Yoichi’s eyes flick over Kudou’s expression, the set of his shoulders, and the curl of his fists.  His pale hand hovers over the switches.  “Should we—”

“Yes,” Kudou says.  “Now.  It’ll distract them.”

Yoichi’s fingers fly.

The explosion is deafening this close.  The furious dust cloud ravages the road, blasting into the street where they took cover.

They leave everything behind.

‘The old place’ is the bar where Kudou and Bruce used to meet up after work—or, more accurately, the alley behind it, which still boasts an ancient, empty dumpster and fractured cobblestones and a manhole that leads directly to the sewers.

They can still make it.

It’s not far.

Kudou took Yoichi’s hand again without even thinking.  He doesn’t push them too fast—Bruce and Oda will have to take a significant detour past the chaos of the building coming down and circle back around to meet them.  They have time.

No drones yet.  Ordinary civilians in the streets dodge out of their way—people on their way to work or lunch or the market or whatever it is ordinary people do.  Some shout after them, and he can feel their eyes burning on the back of his head, but no bullets follow.  The judgment that leaves a gun barrel is the only kind that matters.

Kudou whips their route through a residential area, boosting Yoichi over fences to cut through yards.  It resonates with the recollections of the first time.  It’s the same frequency of fear.

They can make it.

The little neighborhood peels away.  He and Bruce used to wander up and down this street together with their hands in their pockets and their shoulders low, laughing loudly now and then so that it wouldn’t look like they were talking about anything serious.

A chain-link gate topped with barbed wire spans the mouth of the alley.

That wasn’t there two weeks ago, when he and Inoue—

No time.

The padlock is a shit model.  Asano stands between Kudou and the street, blocking the view of him as he bangs the butt of the knife from his belt against the place the shackle fits into the casing, and it pops out.  He shoves the gate open, and the hinges don’t make a sound.

He ushers Yoichi through and kicks it shut behind Asano, waving them on into the shadow of the building to lay low.  He checks his watch.  Eight fifty-one.  Ten minutes.

Yoichi hasn’t quite caught his breath before Kudou sees the two figures on the road.

New gate.

No drones.

Something’s different.

Something’s coming.

He opens the radio channel.

“Everybody get underground,” he says.  “Wherever you are, get out of the city, now.”

He can’t ignore the chorus of responses—he has to check them off, one by one, in his mind.  These are his people.  These are the only thing he has left except a victory that he won’t get to see.

Bruce and Oda veer around the corner, panting.  Asano gets the gate, and Kudou wrenches the manhole cover out of the way.

The others will meet them down there, somewhere.  They’ve been using the sewers more often these days.  There’s one dry passage in between—located almost exactly beneath the center of the city—that links the sewer system to the waterways.  They can cross over there and slip back to the bunker with no one the wiser.

They can make it.

Bruce heads down the ladder first, flashlight in his teeth, and Kudou sends Yoichi after him, then Oda.  Asano glares at him as she starts down the ladder.  It makes sense—Asano can pull the cover closed faster and shave a fraction of a second off of their escape.

Kudou slings himself down after Oda.

There’s some sort of a commotion from above, but she hears it too, scrambling downward faster, and he folds his body as small as he can to take up fewer rungs.  Asano crams himself in at the top, and the manhole cover scrapes back into place to seal them in the dark.

Their boot treads squeal on the wet concrete—or their sneaker soles, in Yoichi’s case—and the damp air presses down on them, and the stench emanates.  Kudou rejects his body’s impulse to hold his breath.  His rib aches.

They run.

His spine tightens like a bowstring every time he hears footfalls splashing in adjoining pipes and tunnels, coming closer.  Sometimes he thinks he can identify the panting over the ripple of the water, but he can’t be sure.

Each time, before they come to the junction, he tightens his grip on Yoichi’s hand and yells “Who are you?” into the dim, dripping wasteland, and his voice echoes off the walls.

A desperate “It’s me!” rings back from every single one of them before the panic ebbs, and they remember to announce their names.

They can’t wait for anyone they’re missing.

They can’t slow down.

They can still make it.

He has to believe in something.

The stragglers swell their numbers, and the splashing of boots in the dreck grows deafening.  The main passages are mostly tap water runoff, tiny soapsuds swirling past their feet.  The smell mingles so many different contaminants that isn’t pleasant, but it doesn’t make you dizzy.

Still—more people are harder to move.

Kudou can’t let go of Yoichi.  Inoue gave them one look and took the lead.  Kudou’s breath burns through him; his rib throbs; his head spins from the seething adrenaline, not from the place.

The gate was new.

It wasn’t designed to stop them—just to slow them down.  Just to tell them that the enemy knew exactly where they were going.

Kudou runs a little faster, dragging Yoichi behind him, trying not to hear the wheezes and the gasping and the bitten-off whimpers of pain.

They’re getting close to the connecting passageway—the twists and turns stretch the distance, but it can’t be more than half a mile from here.  Yoichi can handle it.  It’ll exhaust him, but he can make it in one piece.

Something—feels wrong, sounds wrong as they swing around the next corner—

And come up on a huge steel grating that fills the entire pipe.

Brand-new—no rust.  It blocks the entire passageway, perfectly fitted to the shape of the walls, bolted deep into the concrete at even intervals.

He knows they’re here.

He knows—

It’s uniform everywhere.  The gaps between the intersecting bars are far too small to slip through.  Kudou squints at the bolts, but he knows before he glances back at Asano and sees the grimace that they’re too secure.  Even with Asano’s meta ability at full force, he wouldn’t be able to budge it.

Kudou makes himself breathe evenly.  He burns out the thoughts and barricades the fear.  It doesn’t matter what this implies.  Their choices haven’t changed, and their destination hasn’t.

“Inoue,” he says.

Sharp, dark eyes meet his.  He can almost see the map plotted out behind them, can almost see Inoue trying to reorient it, reconfigure it, into something that will save them.

They don’t have time.

Kudou runs back over to the juncture with the pipe they just came from, dragging Yoichi with him, and points.  “Backtrack.  Right at the first fork.  The next three lefts bring you around.”

There’s a frigid, terrified silence.

But then Bruce shoves Inoue, and Asano shoves Oda, and the impetus shivers through the whole group like the echo of the order, and all at once they move.

Just before they reach the fork, Kudou sees something, at the far end of the dripping tunnel they just sloshed back through.

Eyes.

Pale.

White.

Don’t look back.

Never look back.

He grips Yoichi’s hand, tries to pull hard enough to help him.  Their feet are soaked—heavy with the water, and running through it worsens the weight.  The next tunnel has raised concrete walkways on either side, but for now—

The floor trembles.

It isn’t Kudou’s imagination.  It isn’t his balance giving out.

They can still make it.

They have to make it.

They turn left.

He doesn’t look back—just sideways.  Just enough to meet Yoichi’s eyes, for a fraction of a second.

Yoichi felt it too.

Kudou hauls harder on his hand.  The others are getting further ahead of them.  Bruce pauses, turns, winces.

And then he stops.

His eyes go wide.  His face goes slack.  His shoulders rise and fall.

He scrambles closer to them and grabs for Kudou’s wrist.

The whole sewer shakes—shuddering and bucking underneath them, the vibrations making the concrete shudder like liquid.  All of them stumble trying to find their feet.

Kudou’s heel slips in the dreck, and he staggers.

Yocihi’s hand slips out of his.

He looks back.

Yoichi reaches out.

But this time, the Devil grabs him first.

Kudou leads them back.  That’s who he is.  That’s what he does.  He keeps running.  He keeps most of them alive.

Bruce’s hand shakes as he holds it against the panel to admit them to the control room.  There’s blood all over him, too.

It’s not quite sticky—it’s rubbery, almost.  Tight, like a mask.  It pulls at Kudou’s skin.  He can still taste iron.

He can still hear the pieces of Yoichi hitting the water.

Bruce swallows.  He clears his throat.  He looks at one of the screens, taps the down arrow, and takes a breath.

“Everybody gets two minutes,” he says.  “That’s the best I can do.”

Kudou makes his feet carry him back to the room.  The blankets are crumpled on the left side of the bed.  There’s a dip in the mattress.

His head is swimming too much to count the seconds closely, but it’s been more than two minutes by the time he shuts the shower off.  The water’s still warm.

Everything aches.  There’s something churning in him—worse than nausea.  Different.  A roiling weight.  His skin feels too sensitive.  It feels like someone is scraping a knife blade back and forth across his bones.

He has to get up and go eat something.  He has to move—has to keep moving.  Has to keep living.

He goes to the desk.  He slides the first two fingers of his right hand through the handle of the mug, lifts it, and presses his lips to the rim.

The night that Bruce identifies the strangeness in him as exactly what he knew but couldn’t let himself believe, he has a dream.

It doesn’t feel like a dream.

It feels like a cyclone—like dropping into the dark.  Like feeling his way through the sewers, searching for a hatch, a ladder, a door—for any way out, but there’s nothing, and no light—

And then there is.

He’s in that room—some version of it, some facsimile, untethered in time or truth or space.  He’s in the room they pried Yoichi from.

He’s on his knees at the foot of a throne-like chair, and the chair is occupied by a person glowing—not from any meta ability, not the same way as the famous ones.  Glowing like a meteorite ripping through the atmosphere, burning with the heat.

It’s Yoichi.

The inverse of a black hole—streaming starlight.  White fire.

He doesn’t speak, and it doesn’t crackle, and everything but the shape of his eyes disappears into the pillar of light, but it’s him.

Kudou chokes on the mist, the smoke, the nothing, the everything.  The un-air smothers him, silences him—he’s bound up in black static, subjugated by its weight.  He barely exists.

The light dwindles just far enough to make Yoichi come more clearly into focus.  His hands filter through first, and then his eyes, and his shoulders, and the smile.

Kudou can’t move.  Can’t touch him.  Can’t tell him.

“It worked,” Yoichi says in a garbled sort of wonderment, the flaring outline of his head tipping down to stare at the flickering lights of his outstretched hands.  “Something worked.  I thought… as much as I was thinking anything… I could just be imagining, I suppose.  I could be inventing it after the fact, because my hippocampus was ripped to shreds, so I shouldn’t have had the physical capacity to store a long-term memory—”

Kudou can’t scream at him.  Can’t say Yoichi, I watched him carve you into chunks so fast that some of your blood turned to mist.

“But I think I was thinking it,” Yoichi says, the green spots in the silver flame fixing on the filaments of his fingers as they curl and uncurl.  “In that last second.  I was thinking that I wanted to give you everything.”

He looks up.

He’s smiling.

“It’s not much,” he says.  “But I have this feeling that it can get bigger.  It can be more.  It just needs… time.  And a little gentleness.  And a little strength.”

Kudou can’t say It’s a meta ability so small that scans can barely even pick it up.

Kudou can’t say I’m not as extraordinary as you think I am.

Kudou can’t say I thought I’d taught myself how not to feel this.

Kudou can’t say There’s something wrong with me.

“I’m glad it was you,” Yoichi says, softly.  His eyes are distinct for a split-second—warm, familiar.  “I’m glad all of it was you.”

Kudou tries to take a deep breath.

He wakes up alone.

They get two weeks.

Kudou makes himself focus.  He makes his hands move, makes his feet carry him.  He makes himself work.  He makes himself watch his city and mark the changes on the map.  He makes himself get up out of the bed.  He makes himself use the shower.  He makes himself eat.  Makes himself useful.

They’ll have to find another tactic.  They might have to build another base.

He’s washing dishes.  People don’t want to sit down yet—don’t want to be together, don’t want to talk about it.  Everyone is antsy, agitated.  The writing on the wall might as well be on the whiteboard.  Nothing is safe.  There’s nowhere to run to.

Too many of them are topside too often these days, but he can’t bring himself to criticize them.  They’re trying to escape it.  He can’t take that away.

They don’t seem to mind leaving their dishes behind for him, though.  It’s taking him a while by himself.  He scrubs at a stubborn, mangled half-grain of rice that adhered itself to the side of a bowl like a barnacle.  These haven’t been here long.  How could—

“Kudou,” Bruce’s voice calls from the direction of the control room.

Kudou has known him for fifteen years.

Kudou has never heard his voice shake before.

He drops the bowl—hears it shatter in the sink basin, but he’s already halfway down the hall.

Bruce is holding the door open, pinned in place like he’s frozen in time, staring at the screen showing the camera feed from the apartment roof.

Asano’s headless body lurches over to the entry door.  He raises his right hand, halts, shakes it—haphazardly, uncontrolled, like an animal—until the smoldering cigarette falls from his fingers.

He flattens his palm against the reader.

The door opens.

His corpse drops to the concrete—crumples.  Empty.

The troops on the roof trample right over him.

Kudou makes himself breathe.

Makes himself move.

Makes himself useful.

He expected this.

He reaches up and pulls out three hairs.  Something rumbles—too loud, too close.

He checks the hairs.  One of them broke too high, above the follicle.  He picks it out and tosses it away.

They talked it through.  They made the plan.  They’d acted like it was further in the future, but he’d had a feeling they were wrong.

He holds out the other two.

Bruce stares at them, fixed between the tip of Kudou’s first finger and the pad of his thumb.  It isn’t fear—at least not mostly.

It’s regret.

It’s despair.

It’s grief.

“I can’t,” Bruce says, half-voiced.  Kudou can read the way his mouth forms the words even though an explosion from directly overhead drowns him out.

Dust rains down on Kudou’s shoulder, but he doesn’t plan to move.

“You know what I’m going to say,” he says.

Bruce looks up from his hand and stares into his eyes instead.  Another stream of dust pours down.  Bruce sidesteps it without looking away.

“I’m the only one you can trust,” Bruce says, wearily.

It’s more than that.

You’re the only one who helped to build this—the only one who knows how to build it again.

You’re the only one who can keep it alive.

And I’m the only one he’ll kill slow enough for you to get away.

Kudou owed him better.  Bruce is the best man he’s ever known.  Maybe even good enough to forgive him.

Maybe they’ll have time.  Maybe they’ll have something, someday.

“This is bullshit,” Bruce says, trying for a smile.  “You really want me to say goodbye to my best friend and commit to some kind of spiritual third-wheeling for the rest of time?  In the same breath?  I don’t get paid enough for this.”

“You’re setting salaries now,” Kudou says.

Bruce swallows too hard.  He blinks, and it’s not the dust.

Something else explodes—bigger.  Closer.  Three pieces of the map drop off of the wall.

Kudou steps forward.  He wraps his other hand around Bruce’s shoulder.  It feels impossibly surreal to think it—one last time.

“Find someone,” Kudou says.  “Someone like you.”  Fast.  Smart.  So damn brave.  “This is the next stage of the war.”

“We’ve got time,” Bruce says.

Another blast from above them.  Metal shrieks.  Kudou can hear the rubble, and the shrapnel—like a supernova made of steel.

“I don’t,” he says, and his voice shakes.  “I need you.”

“Then you’ve got me,” Bruce says, and his hand barely trembles as he snatches the stupid hairs—

Something else goes.

Even closer.

But further from the last little exit passage that they’ve never sent anybody through, by the sound of it.  If they’re lucky.

Kudou’s not sure if he’s ever been lucky before.

“See you soon,” he says.

“Shut the fuck up,” Bruce says.  He chokes, and it’s not the hairs.

Boots overhead.  The screaming.  Always the screaming—right up until the silence.

The next wrenching blast makes the floor shake.

He’s here.

This is it.

Kudou was always scared that he’d be afraid, in the face of it—that death would be worse than any part of living ever could have prepared him for.

He’s just angry.

And a little sad, maybe.

Maybe the fear comes later.  Maybe when you look it in the eyes, you are who you are.  Maybe it levels you.  Maybe it strips the rest away.

Maybe you don’t have time.

Maybe fear looks petty, next to eternity.

Bruce swallows.  His eyes flick away from Kudou, towards the ceiling.  The ones that have survived this long are running, directly above them.  The way the terror rives their voices feels like gnawing on a knife.

It distracts Kudou, too.

“I meant to do more,” he says, before he can bite it back.

Bruce reaches out around his arm and grips his shoulder, too.  Feels warm.  Secure.

One last time.

“Shut the fuck up,” he says, “sir.”

“That’s more like it,” Kudou says.  “Get your ass out of here.  That’s an order.”

Bruce breathes out.  It’s steady.

He turns.

And he runs.

He doesn’t look back.

Kudou puts on the gauntlets, steps into the hallway, and turns in the other direction.

He’s not going to die in a hole.

His entire life has been spent running from this motherfucker—trying desperately to get just far enough ahead to hurl impediments at him, to tip obstacles in his path.

Kudou’s going to die on his terms.

On his territory.

With his feet planted and a blade in his hand.

He did what he could.

He kept the wheel turning long enough for it to set something else in motion.  He lived long enough to put this thing into gear.

He lived long enough to wish he had a little bit longer.

There’s something on the other side.  That’s more than most people get.

He walks down the hall to the plexiglass hatch in the ceiling.

There’s blood splattered on it.  His people.  His fault.

There’s starlight, past it.

A shadow falls across the glass.

Kudou raises his right arm, sights, fires, and shifts the world to match his will.

The blade stutters in the air—and then smashes through the glass, shattering it upward like a firework.

He doesn’t even feel the ladder rungs under his hands, under his feet.  Feels like he’s flying.

The sky’s red.

The ground’s red.

He lands on it.  Plants his feet.  Curls his fingers tight around the levers of the gauntlets on both sides.  He holds his head up and looks the Devil in the white, white eyes.

He’s going to die trying to live.

Nothing wrong with that.