Eternal SailorM (Omi/Bombay)
So you want to know about my past now too, eh? Fine then. But I warn you; whatever sweet and light you think it is, it's not. Or whatever darkness and pain you imagine is there, it's much worse.
I suppose we should start with when the person I am now came into being. Gods, how old was I? Seven? Six? Younger than that? I'm not even really sure anymore myself. I was kidnapped, held hostage for money. Money that Papa, with all his estate, wouldn't give the men. I remember sniffling and crying behind my gag when they told me Papa didn't care enough about me to pay the ransom. As young as I might have been, I understood what that meant. I was also beginning to fear the leers on those men's face as they stared down at me. Three shots rang out, and all three men fell to the floor dead, and a man in shadows grabbed me and pulled me along to what I thought would be safety.
That was the first time I met Persia. He called me by a new name and told me to forget about the past, and so I did, becoming Tsukiyono Omi. Takatori Mamoru vanished into the deeper recesses of my mind. That was the first time my mind split, in that cold dark sewer with Persia holding my hand and guiding me along, but we didn't see too much of Omi in those first few years.
A week after I recovered, I started training. The hours were long and grueling, especially for someone as young as I was then. How old was I?! I remember my first trainer; not his name or anything, though, because I was told to call him Sensei, and so I did. Sensei didn't tolerate failure of any kind and took any mistakes I made out of my flesh. As I lay on a cold cot in an even more cold and barren room, I felt my mind split again, and suddenly I was in the back of it, where there was no pain. Looking back now, I realize that's when Bombay was created, when I was born, though I didn't have a name for many years to come.
I spent several years training, mostly with Sensei but also with Manx and Birman and some of the other teams. Then one day, in projectile training, I almost killed Sensei - or maybe I did kill him; I certainly never saw him again. I was placed in a team the day after that.
I don't know; are you expecting me to say I started off in Weiss? Nah, I should be so lucky. My first team was nothing like the White Hunters. Masa and Hikaru and Seta... Strange. I haven't thought of them in years.
My first mission out with them was the shape of all other missions to come with them. We were pitted against the Benandanti (which I wonder now, if they might not have been a part of Este themselves) whose main crime was kidnapping children and sacrificing them to some unknown power. Yeah, I bet they were part of Este, now that I look back on it. But at the time, our only knowledge was that they were killing kids they picked up off the streets. So, nominated by being the youngest one of the group, the only one under seventeen actually, I was the one set out on the streets to wait for the Benandanti. It only took a few hours for me to get picked up, and thirty minutes after that, some middle-aged man was pounding me into a squeaky and foul-smelling bed while my team listened through the hidden microphone on my clothes halfway across the room. I think I was on the verge of passing out when the soft "ping" of a silenced shot cut through the air and the man's brains splattered all over my face. I looked up and smiled at Hikaru as he stood me up and dressed me like I was a doll and wiped the blood - and other things - off my face with his own shirt.
Masa was pissed when we got back to the car, quietly hissing that we could have endangered the mission. I could only smile when Hikaru told him to shove it and drive. He held me in his arms and rocked me back and forth, crooning something softly that was so indistinct I could tell the words for sure, but it put me to sleep the rest of the drive back to the safehouse and even when he carried me into my room there. I couldn't sleep through Masa beating the hell out of him for it, though; Seta made sure to wake me up for that. I remember hobbling over to the living room and watching Hikaru go down with one hard backhand.
That was the beginning of the pattern. I'd get set out to look for the Benandanti, some bastard would pound me into a nasty bed, Hikaru would save me, Masa would kick Hikaru's ass. Most of it was carefully left out of the mission reports Seta wrote; Kritiker probably thought my team was doing a very thorough job keeping me from getting hurt. Oh, there were deviations from the pattern: sometimes, if I was too badly... damaged from my mission, Masa would be the one who tried to drive me through the mattresses. Of course, once he tired of me for the night, he'd storm off to go drinking with Seta, and Hikaru would slip in and get me cleaned back up and rock me through the rest of the night. He always called me his "little doll;" I never objected.
Looking back, Hikaru was to me then almost like what Yohji was to me in Weiss: an older brother figure, better than the ones Mamoru'd had. He showed me most everything I know about computers; together he and I built the Kritiker network from the ground up, then I took over mission reports, e-mailing them to Manx personally. But I didn't think of my team then as my family, not like Weiss always was to me.
Then came the orders. I don't know; I think I was eleven then. The rest of your team has become a liability, Omi. Take care of them and report back to Kritiker for replacement. -Manx... That was all it said. Kill them. So I did.
I'm just Kritiker's best weapon.
Of course, Kritiker never said how they wanted them gone, just that they needed to be dead and immediately. I never really had much of an opinion on Seta, other than he was quiet and he had taught me well how to take whatever I wanted. I slit his throat while he was eating breakfast; not my best job, but it was still done nonetheless.
I'm just a killer.
Killing Masa was fun, but I'd known it would be. He picked me up and threw me on the bed to fuck me. I kept rolling till I landed on my feet on the other side. Along the way, I yanked the knife I'd used on Seta out of its hiding place in my shorts pocket, throwing it at him. It stuck in his hip; it was one of those rare times I missed my precise target. At least I didn't miss a few of his major blood vessels and a tendon in his leg with that throw, effectively crippling him. I stabbed him to death after that; it took a while.
I'm just a murderer.
And Hikaru, you ask. Yes, what about Hikaru? My dear Hikaru, who never laid an unwelcome hand on me, who treated me like a doll... him I poisoned, picking something quick and painless. It was the best I could do for him.
What else is there? I'm a monster.
Manx looked almost surprised when I showed up at Kritiker headquarters that night; maybe she'd been expecting them to kill me instead; but she covered it well and handed me my new assignment: to assist in creating and later function in a new team, Weiss.
So I went where I was told - and was nearly floored to find out my new cover would be a flowershop. Momoe, a former Kritiker agent, would be working with me till the team was built enough to be operational, and so the two of us functioned for two years... till Kudou Yohji showed up. Birman dropped him on us, injured, with almost no explanation except that he'd be part of Weiss.
When I first saw Yohji, I never expected him to survive the night. He'd been shot in the stomach several days before, and it had gotten infected; he had a fever that you could almost feel from across the room. But with a bit of patience and diligence on Momoe's and my parts, he survived. It was amazing the first time he opened his eyes: I thought I was seeing Hikaru again. Who would have thought two people in Japan had that same shade of green eyes? Of course, later I noticed that it was just a kind of projection of hope on my part, and they didn't look that much alike, but for that one moment...
Manx arranged everything very neatly after that. Suddenly, Yohji was my legal guardian instead of Momoe and he was part owner of the flowershop. It wasn't called the Koneko no Sumu Ie yet, and we weren't Balinese and Bombay yet; hell, Mamoru was still functioning a bit then, and I didn't have a name, and Omi only came out around Yohji in the shop. I sometimes wonder how Yohji never caught on, with my wild mood swings between personalities and frequent memory gaps. Maybe it was because he chalked it up to me having difficulties with turning thirteen and being an assassin or maybe he was still recovering while Omi was cementing his way out as the dominant personality.
I got my name as soon as Yohji was well enough to go out on missions. That's when the Koneko got its name as well. Manx showed up and gave us our task and called us by our codenames. Yohji grinned at me and poked me in the ribs, saying, "There's a kitten in the house." That's where Kitten in the House flowershop came from.
So I fought at Balinese's side for four years. I fought with Siberian three years. Manx didn't drop him on us right after his "death" at least, but rather as soon as the Kritiker medical staff said he was all right to leave. He'd been badly burned, badly enough that he couldn't feel anything in places, and he was still moving with a slight limp, but he refused to talk about it. Whatever his "death" was, it had been painful. He had just turned seventeen when Manx delivered him to us that winter's day late in the year. I envied him a lot once I got to know him a bit. His life before Weiss had been so idyllic; he'd come from a happy family, he loved being around people, he was so unfailingly nice, he was so... innocent. Kritiker's missions drove that out of him quickly.
So that was Weiss for the longest time: me, Yohji, and Ken. It was almost perfect, like a family. I mean, there was Yohji to be the oldest brother and tease and protect us. Siberian was the middle one, tormented incessantly by Yohji but perfectly willing to pick on me as well, and me, the baby of the group. Or rather, there was Omi. I had a name and job function now: I was Bombay, and I was to protect Omi, both physically and psychologically, do what he couldn't do, take what he couldn't take, bear what he couldn't bear. Really, then I didn't mind at all; I liked the way people thought of Omi - and, by extension of Omi, me. It never occurred to me that I could be a separate person off of Omi.
Then a certain gorgeous redhead showed up and threw a gear into our little family mentality. Yohji wanted him from the moment he saw him, even though we began our association by fighting against each other. [1] I think Ken might have been a bit dazzled when he saw the redhead again, though his reaction left a bit to be desired. And me? Simply put, I wanted him. Omi could have cared less either way; he was too busy noticing all the girls coming into the flowershop; but I wanted the redhead I would come to know as Abyssinian.
Honestly, it didn't take me that long to get my way either. Two months wasn't that long for me, not when I was only able to make seldom appearances anymore in those days. It all started after a mission, a horrible mission that brought back unpleasant memories for me. A group, likely the Benandanti again, after so long in silence, had been making children disappear, never to be seen or heard from again. I remember it well because Mamoru and I had to do so much covering for Omi then. Persia, via videotape, and Manx laid the mission out for us, and I promptly volunteered to go undercover. It was habit; I thought of the Benandanti as my personal problem, something I needed to stop myself.
I never expected Ken and Yohji to protest so much. They alternated between yelling at me for considering something so dangerous and yelling at Manx for bringing the mission to us in the first place. Abyssinian was silent; in those days, he never turned down missions, and he hardly ever spoke aloud to any of us.
To make a long mission short, Manx talked them down and I got sent out as bait. Once I was in the field again and the first person approached me, though, I nearly panicked. I missed most every word of his propositioning me, unable to hear it over the pounding of my heart. Suddenly I felt arms around my shoulders. I looked back and there was Abyssinian, looking his usual cold and collected self. I remember turning and clinging to him, totally missing whatever he said to the man. The first night between us was rather strange; I remember crying a bit and asking him a few times not to mention it in the morning; I left before the sun came up and went back to my own bed, silently grateful the next day was Sunday: no school, and short shifts at the Koneko. I'm afraid I wussed out a bit: I didn't want to explain things to Omi or Mamoru.
When Manx showed up at the Koneko that day to find out what went wrong, the two older members of Weiss cornered her in the mission room while Ken and I minded the store. Next thing I knew, Manx was emerging from the mission room and announcing that the Benandanti mission was being passed on to Crashers.
Yeah, I slept with Abyssinian - Ran, Aya... I don't even know what he likes to be called anymore... Guess I'll just stick to calling him Abyssinian till he tells me differently, like he'd ever do that... He still doesn't talk a lot about himself. Still, during that final battle against Este, when he was looking down at Sakura with that soft look in his eyes and told her his name was Ran, I could have almost died of the jealousy running through me. I could never remember a moment when he looked at me like that, not in that bit of time we had together, and he'd never told me his real name. But to be fair, I never told him a single one of my secrets, and really we weren't together all that long. It wasn't that much longer till Mamoru was out-ed to Weiss, and Abyssinian was staring at Omi and me with betrayal in his eyes.
I remember the Human Chess game, when Abyssinian went after Takatori Reiji instead of the intended target. Seeing that pure hatred in his eyes on that rooftop as he glared up at the helicopter, I almost broke it off then and there. I don't know; maybe all the talk of drugs is dead-on target; Abyssinian's very hard to give up. I remember him clinging to me after that mission. How could I give him up?
And by that same tangent, how can I give him up now? I couldn't break it off when my life was on the line; I'm damned sure not giving it up it's my heart at risk. Yeah, you heard me. I think I could fall for Abyssinian, as surely as I've fallen for Schuldig.
How fucked up is that? That's love for you, I guess.
15-16 March 2002
Geez... Proof positive Bombay/Omi/Mamoru is insane!
*pokes River* Damn it, you "muse"-d me! Hope this gives everyone someone to play with. I think Bombay's talking to Somali, but I'm not sure; that's up to you.
And maybe I shouldn't listen to Queen while I'm writing. Ick and ouch appears...
*waves bai-bai and runs off dragging her little Bombay-Muse along with her*
[1] There isn't really anything in the series to cover when Ran joined Weiss, so I grabbed a little from the Weiss kreuz manga "Assassin and White Shaman".