Characters: the Weiss boys, Yohji POV
Warning: gore, foullanguage, ANGST
Summary: Yohji (Balinese)reflects ona bloody mission

Harigane

Bali!

From his corner, a blind spot at the far end of the room, Aya is mouthing my code name and holds up his hand, four fingers spread, then points at the door and holds seven fingers up. Four guards, through that door, in seven seconds. Countdown to murder. He has his big slicer ready and edges his way closer, not too cautiously because he now needs the surveillance camera to catch his image. He is wearing his mission face: all focused, intent, eager. I know mine is concentrated and blank.

I don't like hand to hand combat. Weird perhaps, because the weapon I am skilled with is a close, intimate thing. Harigane. Wire. To choke, slice, rip. I had my fill of it during missions, I have no qualms doing it, but I do not have to like it.

We went into the factory complex, found the units making brand new equipment for spanky new drug production lines, and blew them up. At shift change, the place was supposed to be empty and surveyed only by an impressive array of security cams. Omi blotted them out when he had finished downloading all vital data from the company computers for further investigation, but in our haste to catch the right moment, we missed one of the little eyes – perhaps it was new and not on the blueprint – sod's law, really, overvalued by fiction writers and underrated in reality.

We heard the guards approach before the door hissed open. I wormed my way beneath the smouldering production lines, while Aya coursed around to distract whoever was watching the security monitor and instructing the four men with guns who secured the hall from the doorway.

Shadowlike, Omi had followed them. He hailed them and took one down with a clean single shot through the eye. Lots of blood, a mess of brains and fragmented bone sopping from the dead body onto the shiny white floor. Before they could act, Aya and I were upon them, doing our job.

I'm not squeamish, but I don't cope well with the smell. Death stinks. Of heated iron when the blood gushes out, of iffy meat and foul eggs when bowels are ripped open, of shit and urine when someone dies in agony and the body gives way, dissolving into the things it stashes away and does away with neatly while alive. Death reeks of vomit and sweat, of scorched skin where a bullet burns its way into flesh, of burned hair when a projectile smashes its way into a skull.

There's nothing dignified about dying.

The harigane looks innocent and cuts deeply with little effort. Like the touch of poison, or the bite of a venomonous snake, once it starts doing the damage it is designed to cause, it is almost impossible to stop, and it works in a matter of seconds. Skin, cartilage, tendons are tough matter, but anyone who ever slid a razor sharp knife through butchered meat knows what I am talking about. I am well versed: sling, ensnare, pull, tear it through, the pulsing gush of hot blood starting before the final tug that is almost a beheading, leaving only the spinal column of the neck to connect head to body. With all soft matter cut through and no muscles to hold it up, the still living head will loll aside like that of a puppet with severed strings.

I have seen those heads in my dreams. In the moments when they bleed away the warmth of life, sliding into the cold oblivion of death, when the first frantic spurting of blood lessens to a pulsing stream in the rhythm of the hard, slowing beat of the dying heart, their eyes speak to me. Conscious, terror-frozen eyes, mingling astonishment and pain and sometimes hate that survives until they drop.

Death also has sounds. Sometimes, when I'm too tired to watch out for the signs, I'm taken under by dreams of smells and sounds. I try to drink those dreams away. Mostly it works.

The man I took out sawing my wire through his throat died with blubbering, gargling sounds as the blood from his veins flooded his throat and rushed down his windpipe, his chest heaving as he was frantically sucking in air and only got more blood down his lungs. I have long, hard hands. For this type of work, I wear thick leather gloves, the knuckles padded and filled with sand for protection and impact should I have to hit someone.

The harigane is a simple weapon. A length of something hard and thin with small grips attached to either end that can be adjusted to either choke or cut. I use strong monofilament wire for cutting. Piano strings, for example. Steel is best: sharp, swift and as painless as it gets. I tend to have a few neat coils of it in my pocket, just in case, and I am a habitual collector of wine corks for handles. It detracts from the nasty purpose of the finished object that its parts are so mundane, and before missions, I will focus by making my weapons while listening to radio babble.

Guns are loud. We are swift and silent workers. By the time we were done in there, I looked like some slaughterhouse sticker, my gloves were squidging, my overall clinging to my skin with that sticky rust coloured mess. A human being has around seven litres of blood. It looks much when it all leaks out. Our footprints were long, slurred crimson tracks at first, close to the door, then further down the hallway we made neat little shapes with our soles, and finally the colour faded into faint, broken patterns, like leaves strewn casually along a purposeful track.

We don't deal with nice people. We are not nice people. Sometimes it all makes sense, until I forget just how it fit together, and I have to think it through all over again. More often I'd rather not think about it at all. I like my drink.

In passing, I saw a few severed fingers scattered by the body with the gaping throat – he had tried to pull the tightening wire off his neck; I had sliced off his fingertips at the first joint where they curled round the steel.

I don't eat before missions because when they get hairy, I wanna puke out my guts. I still heave dry, and keep spitting because I have the cloying taste of blood in my mouth. Aya has bits of something that looks like innards sticking to his boots – the katana isn't nice in action, cutting open what nature has packaged so neatly into working order, and spilling it all over the floor in a trailing mess.

Aya is efficient, but sometimes he refuses to be. He believes into revenge, and in his mindset, he knows exactly what he is doing, and why. He has no doubt that he can judge how some folk deserve to die. I have him seen reaching into someone and drag their insides out. If he is in a nasty mood, or in a hurry, or – very occasionally – just messes up, he will let them crawl around like that until they die.

We may be a team, but I like having my wire close at night, under my pillow.

Ken was waiting with our getaway car, we piled in and sped off, leaving behind mayhem. Omi always goes quiet after this kind of messy job. Aya, on the passenger seat, cleans his damn katana that would carve right through him or Ken were the car to bump or veer unexpectedly. Sometimes I have the very uncomfortable impression that he enjoys what we are doing. Yet when I lie by his side later, when he will have showered and smells warm and fresh of pine needles and sandalwood, all savagery will have slipped away, like a mottled dream. He will be Aya whom I love – cool, cultured, beautiful. He always startles me with this transformation. Are we all like this?

Ken is talking at Omi. Always does this, to settle the chibi, and it works even though it's not obvious.

I want to howl.

Instead, I lift unsteady hands to light a cigarette from a packet that bears my bloody fingerprints, and try to concentrate on the fleeting bands of light that illuminate the midnight road, on the rain that gusts against the windscreen, and on the money transfer that will arrive a couple of hours after Omi sends the mission report.

We are the good guys. We do our job and leave the judgement to others. We are instruments, Kritiker is our brain. We get paid well. The justice of the law is slow and blunt, it is corrupt and inefficient. Kritiker have all but replaced it. Kritiker clean the world of scum, and we're the scouring pad they use.

We are Weiss. We are hailed as heroes. That makes it right.

Right?

I need to believe that this makes it right.

I need to believe.

Ken, stop the damn car, I wanna puke, now.