When it was over, I took away everything they had and gave them everything they'd ever wanted.
***
Yohji's nurse - wife, now - wasn't my work, as pleasant a surprise as she was. Yohji's amnesia, however, came through due to a bit of effort that I blackmailed out of Schuldig. You don't get amnesia like that without extensive brain damage, the expert I'd hired told me. Schuldig snorted inside my mind and named his price. He got it... But that's another story.
I watch him and Asuka often. They warm my heart; give me a reminder to what I'm working for. It hurts, that warmth, but I haven't been afraid of pain since... Since never, really.
They have three children, all girls. They are bright and charming and beautiful. I fear for the world - or for Yohji's peace of mind, anyway - when they reach sexual maturity. As of now, the youngest one, hardly even three years old, had already got every single member of the family wrapped around her finger. The eldest, who turned eight a few weeks ago, is quiet and almost unnaturally serious. She is her father's favorite, and I think I know why.
The middle one is my own favorite. She has eyes that see everything, and you can see everything in them, reflected twice as big and beautifully green. She smiles and cries without shame, and holds on to her parents whenever she wants to, even though she is a fully grown girl of six.
I can't deny that I envy her, but when she cries, I cry as well. Such tears have become precious to me.
Asuka does her work earnestly, with such care for her patients' well being. She comes home at night brimming with joy because a girl with cancer has gone into remission, or silent and withdrawn because a young man lost his sight to diabetes. Yohji shares her joy and does his best to ease her pain.
They fight infrequently, over trivial things. I think she wondered about his sanity when he flat down refused their eldest daughter the fencing lessons she had her heart set on. Otherwise, I think there are few husbands who respect their wives so much. I was almost surprised to see him not only practice monogamy, but to never so much as look at another woman. I miss his flirting attitude, but among the things I miss, this one is so small.
He works as a high-rate clerk in a shipping company. Since he awoke from the enforced coma Schuldig had put him into, I haven't heard him complain once about the work he had to do. He's as calm at work as he is at rest. He hadn't lost his charm, but he lost that hungry desperation that attracted mostly people who wanted to be hurt by him.
His name isn't Kudou Yohji anymore. I took care of that, as well.
***
It took nearly a month for Ken to understand. Human beings need a goal in order to live as anything but shadows of themselves. Knowing Ken-kun, it wasn't much of a surprise that he would need to score a goal in order to find one.
He stayed in that prison for two months. He needed to heal. It did make me smile to think that Ken could only find freedom when he was captive, but it was true. Ken's ability to concentrate on one thing was both his greatest weapon and his greatest flaw; since he was so very physical, he rarely took the time to think things through. His time confined alone in the darkness allowed him to reflect, and his time with people, in the light, gave him the ability to put his thoughts into actions.
When he was released he was given, along with his clothes and belongings, a note. It said:
"There is a school in Kyoto that needs a soccer coach. If you want, the red car waiting for you outside will take you there."
It wasn't signed. Ken knew my handwriting well enough.
I hadn't really expected him to go to the car, but he did. He smiled at Siamese, my lovely new assistant, and asked, "Since you're already here, could you take me to the airport?"
I paid for his tickets. He sent me the money back later on through Siamese. I was only a little annoyed. I knew that it wasn't me he was breaking free of, but Kritiker. And as I had allowed myself to become nothing but Kritiker, the difference was too small to matter.
It mattered anyway.
He spent the next three years looking for Aya, each time settling down in some town, teaching sports and self-defense to anyone who would learn it. He still had every bit of the money he'd earned in Weiss, but he rarely touched it.
Three years later, he found a tombstone. It was in Tokyo, because Aya-chan wished to have her beloved brother buried close by, so that she could visit his grave. Ken stood at the grave for nearly an hour before turning and walking away. On his way out, he stopped to say, "You were supposed to wait for me, you bastard."
Aya, characteristically, didn't answer.
For a few days, I was afraid. One of the many monitors in my office was attuned strictly to Ken. I would've installed a camera in whatever room he would have stayed in, but it turned out unnecessary as he asked Aya-chan to let him stay in his old room in Kitten in the House. The cameras there were installed before even I had joined Weiss.
For four days, Ken didn't leave his room for more than ten minutes at a time. He spoke to no one, didn't sleep, didn't change his clothes, didn't eat. His eyes were glazed and opaque.
At the dawn of the fifth day, Ken smiled and went down to the store. With assassin-sure feet, he snuck into Aya-chan's bedroom and turned off the alarm clock, opening the store by himself.
Kitten was still frequented by swarms of giggling highschoolers, but the faces had changed. Even the few customers who stuck around couldn't remember him, but then again, they were now respected wives and mothers who couldn't afford to be caught ogling pretty florists.
Ken helped at Kitten for two months before there was a job vacancy at a nearby school. The position was for a teacher of biology and agriculture. The schoolmasters agreed, after a touch of persuasion, that Ken's knowledge of flowers and plants was sufficient for the position. The children positively adored Ken. Ken had an eye for seeing the best in children. He seemed to know almost magically what each child's greatest strength was and where their weaknesses lay. Unobtrusively, without drawing attention, Ken made each child bloom under his careful hands.
He married Aya-chan two years later. All the gifts they received were signed and expected; however, a week later one of the children Ken tutored, a brilliant boy from a poor family, received an unexpected scholarship ensuring his future. Really, they were terribly difficult to shop for.
***
Of the three of them, Aya was both the easiest and the most difficult to... To whatever it is I did for him. Find a happy ending, perhaps. Or maybe just an ending.
Like too many people I've known, Aya's biggest problem was clear; he had no purpose. His sister was avenged, awakened and happy. He was close to his thirties with no higher education whatsoever beside a course on history he took in order to teach in Koua Academy. The only things he knew how to make were dead bodies and flower arrangements. Where could he go?
At first, I hoped for him to find something, anyway. I'd nearly sworn off hope, using probabilities and educated guesses where I had no certainties, but my past partners were the last ones I allowed myself to feel those emotions for. Even though it was a mistake. Because it was a mistake.
Aya drifted in the world for a while. Everywhere he went, he was cold and aloof, and still people were attracted to him; highschoolers with adoration-tinged eyes drawn to his strength, sophisticated men and women of the world who loved him for his beauty, motherly souls who wanted to cure the misery they saw in him. He was always kind, always polite, and always distant. Eventually, his admirers gave up, and Aya was alone again.
He worked wherever he could, for a while. He tended a bar for nearly four months. He was a construction worker for a few weeks. He even attempted a career in computers, using the little he was willing to learn from me so long ago.
He started killing again a total of eighteen months after Weiss' last mission.
He'd worked alone before, and then he didn't have the knowledge he had nowadays. His body was still in its prime. He'd left his katana behind when he left Weiss, but he found other weapons - less dramatic, perhaps, but much easier to hide and to discard. He conducted his own investigations.
Even though my heart is as tough and dead as old leather now, I felt it break when I saw Aya struggling back into the life I tried to help him escape.
I hadn't understood - or, perhaps, I hadn't wanted to understand - until I was told about the conversation he had with a nun in a churchyard. Could I have really been that stupid, that blind? How many times have I heard him say that we were damned, every one of us, that redemption was not only impossible, but also undesirable?
What kind of god forgives men like us?
Aya never wanted forgiveness. Aya never wanted a normal life - never wanted *any* life. Aya, from his creation, was a dead thing; a zombie, a demon summoned to execute vengeance. Now that his task was fulfilled, he was useless, nothing but a vessel that once carried something important.
Neither my money nor my men could put what was broken together again.
So I gave him the one gift I could think of. A man, himself not knowing what he was doing but knowing that he'd better obey his orders, slipped an absurdly small amount of money to a child in a dark alleyway. He also gave the child a knife, warned him not to touch the blade, and told the child who their target was. It was done quickly, anonymously. It had no grace, no poetry to it. It hardly had a reason let alone rhyme. But I saw understanding shine on Aya's face, and the sweetest peace I've seen in my life.
The wound wasn't deadly in itself. The child wasn't strong enough to truly drive the blade in; it was hardly more than a flesh wound. Stomach wounds are difficult, but Aya could have lived if the blade hadn't been poisoned with one of my own concoctions. It was basically a painkiller, strengthened a hundred times over. It took about half an hour to kill someone of Aya's weight. It caused absolutely no pain; it actually numbed the knife wound. There was no antidote.
The passers-by might have seen a beautiful young man stagger, then fall to his knees, clutching a mailbox as though it was his long- lost best friend. Then, they might have seen another young man approach the fallen one and half-drag, half-carry him into a car that stood nearby.
I think I just didn't have it in me to let Aya die alone.
I held him as he bled, and he smiled at me. "Crying again, Omi?" he murmured.
I shook my head. "Omi died two years ago," I said. "I am nothing but the son of the man you hated."
"And yet, you cry for me." He leaned his head on my shoulder.
I smoothed his hair. "Of course I do. I love you." We all did. There was something about Aya that inspired love.
"My sister will be kept safe." It wasn't a question or an order, just a request for confirmation.
"I take care of my family. She will be safe." My voice shook, which I wouldn't have hid even if I could have. I never held back my tears; if I had any weaknesses, they deserved to be exploited.
"Good." His hand clenched into a fist, gripping my shirt fiercely. He shed blood and I shed tears. We were both silent.
When he started to cool, I gently put his head down and moved to the driver's seat. I drove back to Tokyo in silence and made a few calls. In the morning, the tombstone carrying the name 'Fujimiya Ran' had an actual body beneath it. It had been there since Aya joined Weiss, placed when Kritiker had deleted all his existing records.
Aya-chan was notified. She held a memorial service for him a few days later, which I didn't attend. I did come to his grave later. I could hear seagulls screaming, and I remembered the first grave I had even visited: Ouka-chan, my dear, unaware not quite sister. There was goodness in her, as much as she tried to hide it behind that bossy exterior.
I didn't turn when I felt a presence at my back. Eventually, she spoke. "I should kill you."
"As should many others. There's quite a queue, in fact."
"You shouldn't be making jokes at my brother's grave." Her voice was completely steady.
I closed my eyes and sighed. "I shouldn't." I turned to her then. I hadn't seen her in person since I've become Persia, and even though I kept close tabs on her, it wasn't the same. It shook me to see how tall she'd become; she loomed over me, as grave as a gargoyle.
She was as beautiful as her brother, although she looked nothing like him. She was sad, yes, but her posture, her hands and her hair, showed that she was leading a good life. Overall, she was happy, even in mourning.
"Will you tell me about him?" she asked.
I shook my head. "What's past is past. Best to let it stay that way. He was your brother, and he loved you. What more do you need?"
She moved, as if uncomfortable. "Answers would be nice."
I smiled at her, because she was young - so young, even though she was older than me - and strong and whole, and I've seen so many broken things. "Sometimes, it's better to go on wondering."
I left her alone with her brother. I was sure they had much to talk about, and it was a conversation in which I had no part.
***
For myself, I didn't make an ending. We can't write our own stories, as hard as we might try. But my story, as far as I can put it down, was this:
When Epitaph was destroyed, I knew that I couldn't return to Weiss. Or, rather, I was the only one who could.
Killing is a profession that distorts the soul. Even Aya could've healed, had he been given the opportunity early enough, but years of destroying lives - dark beasts or not - destroy who you are, as well. It had made Ken into someone who sought pain and violence for their mere mindlessness and made Yohji want to rip his own soul into shreds simply so he wouldn't have to look at it anymore.
I think I've said enough about what it did to Aya.
As for myself... I was never meant to be something else. My father, however good intentioned, had used me as a weapon to hurt his brother. I wasn't raised; I was trained. Assassination was a way of life for me since I was five.
It took its toll on me, as well. But where the others grew violent, careless in their rage, I became cold. Deaths were numbers and losses were calculated. Perhaps thinking that way was evil, but how could it be more evil than abandoning my responsibility? Try to understand. Which should be more important: the well-being of my family, both the one I was born into and the one I chose, or my own soul? I chose them, and I stand by that choice.
If I ever had a weakness, it was my longing for a family. As I took on the duties that came with my name, I realized that there were more definitions to a family than I could possibly understand. This is the one I chose: The ones you love and protect are your family. When I became Persia, the whole of Japan became family to me. Every boy was my brother and every woman was my mother. I owed everything I had to them. I protected them, and paid with the lives of others and pieces of my own soul for that protection.
And yet... there were things even more sacred, because how can you say that the blood of a man off the street if the same as the blood of a man who fought beside you, to whose wounds you have tended? And so, I chose. I will find some way to protect Japan while letting my friends, my brothers, rest at last. There will be no more Weiss, no more young men with torn lives shedding blood to stop bloodshed. I sent them away, to find their own lives - their own happiness, if such a thing was possible for the likes of us.
I think I did. I think *they* did.
If I were still Tsukiyono Omi, I would have felt so lonely that my breath would catch in my throat and choke me to death. As it is, I shrug and bear on. I have a responsibility to uphold the Takatori standard of cold-hearted bastards, after all.
To be honest, I found peace, of a sort. While the choices I make are still terrible, they don't affect me anymore. I know that, when Judgment comes, I will be found guilty. It was my choice, and I made it freely. But with every life I bring to an end, ten more will live; for every mistake that I've made, I've made ten decisions that were right.
I sit in my office now, watching the monitors. I can see Yohji's daughters on one screen, making a mess of a cake for their mother's birthday, their parents laughing in the background; I see Ken teaching his two-year-old son how to play soccer; I can see Aya-chan in the kitchen, her eyes dreamy as she caresses her once again growing belly. Everyone and everything I love, crammed in such a small space.
Let hell or high water come as they may. I have made my choices, and I am at peace.
Notes: Beta'd by Patti. Thank-yous go to her; recriminations go to me. All comments are welcome.