Spectrum
Disclaimers: There are few things I own – this is not one of them.
Author: Avium
Rating: PG-13 for artistic violence (is there such a thing?)
Pairings: Crawford x Ken
Fic length: ?
Timeline: Post Kapitel TV series, pre-Dramatic Precious
Author's note: My sorry excuse of a fanfic. Please ignore the deliberate attempt to stall the continuation of 'Monochromatic Whispers'.
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Red is the colour of blood.
One thing that they never taught him until it was too late – if at all: he would never get a second chance.
No chance to set things right; no rewind button to hit so he could replay that attempt. Only in his dreams was he ever able to walk up to the plate once more, and even those dreams came all too rarely to count.
That's why he couldn't afford to miss. He had only one strike left in his arsenal, and if he missed he would have failed the entire team. So when he detected the first flickers of a growling shadow limping towards him, he held his fists at ready and waited.
Then he had struck; silently and quickly so his victim had no time to see the face of his killer. He never liked the way that they looked at him whenever he pressed close – weapon cleaving intimately between ribs with his face but a silent whisper away. Foolishly, he had felt like a treacherous lover at times, but at others… well, only the kill counted.
Precision.
With the malevolence that only a passion-stirred lover could possess he would bestow a smile upon the stricken features sinking beneath him. Then he would rotate his hand in a counter clockwise direction. Sometimes he would do it slowly; other times he did it with a blurring twist.
Efficiency.
Why couldn't they die quietly, anyway? It might have something to do with the pain of having cold steel slicing through warm organs. The only trouble was that he had forgotten what pain was like. When the blood began to spurt around his cut he would snarl and jam his fist harder into the trembling body – as if it would stop the flow of his victim's life fluids.
Clean?
He suppressed a smirk.
Not by a long shot.
The offending blades retracted from the quivering husk with a savage upwards lift. He thought he heard the man gurgle against a mouthful of blood before hitting the floor with a dull thump. He didn't watch the man fall; he was too busy looking at his own blood-soaked hands. He would look at them with the wonderment of a man who would not believe what he had just done. He might even test if those hands really were his by flexing a few fingers. The quiet obedience of the fingers before him played confirmation to his disdain.
No one ever said bugnuks were easy to use.
"Ken?"
No one ever told him that this was the way he would end up.
"Ken?"
He clenched his fists and looked up at the redhead standing before him.
Ken didn't hate them for it; there was no need to.
After all, it would be a waste of time hating those damned to live like the soulless, walking dead.
His lips twitched slightly, and morphed into a sneer.
-@-@-@-@-
Brad Crawford hated blood, if only for the fact that it rendered his suits unsuitable for professional laundering – he did not particularly cherished the thought of having to spend time explaining the origins of the stains to the nosey idiots manning the dry-cleaning counter. Blood stains would come off easily enough if one tackles the stain the instant it hits the fabric, but most of the time it was not practical to leave missions halfway through to handle such trivial matters.
After all, he was not amused by the thought of appearing finicky in front of Schwarz, or anyone for that matter. Meticulous, yes. But not finicky.
He leaned back against his seat, letting the warm orange of his table lamp hit the underside of his chin. He should be in bed, not sitting in front of his empty tabletop with nothing to keep him interested. But his Gift had told him to do otherwise – something which he would never question.
Crawford found out from an early age that blood stains would always show up on white suits no matter what he did afterwards.
But he never stopped wearing them.
He simply made long-range firearms his cronies.
Understandably, this attitude prevailed within his residence. That was why he was not thrilled to find a maroon-splattered brunette dripping dark liquid over his carpet – never mind the fact that he already knew ahead of time that Ken would arrive in that precise state. He also knew that no amount of yelling would lead to anything productive with the boy, so he settled for folding his arms across his chest while narrowing his gaze at the slouching figure, as if hoping to burn a hole in his head with the intensity of his glare.
Initially he was patient, waiting for the boy to speak. But as the crimson pool on the carpet grew larger, his tolerance shrunk in direct proportion to it. At length the American broke the silence:
"Ken – do not die on my carpet."
It was not a request; it was an order.
He waited for a reaction from the boy, knowing that in due time he would get a response. After what seemed like an eternity of holding out the brunette on the carpet looked up and grinned sheepishly.
Crawford did not drop his scowl, but Ken continued to grin.
He knew that Crawford never meant it when he said such things – poor guy was just trying desperately to keep his tough-guy act going.
Ken raised and dropped his shoulders rapidly, tilting his head to one side as he did so – "Sorry. It got a little messy tonight."
The raven-haired man strode over to him, stopping when he was but a caress away. Quietly, he began to run hands down Ken's body, applying varying pressure on each plane with his fingers. Ken allowed the man to continue with the prodding for a few seconds before he backed away, waving at Crawford dismissively.
"It's not my blood."
Crawford remained expressionless as he queried, "Then whose is it?"
"Oh, a couple of people's – the guard at the factory, one of the security guys within, our target…" Fingers were counted off one by one, "Oh, and Aya's too."
Amber eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"Ken, what are you doing?"
"Go away, Aya. Just… go away."
"Stop hitting him already, Ken – he's dead."
"Like I fucking don't know."
"Ken!"
"I said to go away!"
"It was an accident. I got a bit of Aya's arm," he pinched the air to give Crawford a visual estimate before shrugging it off, "Just a tiny nick - nothing that a strip of plaster can't cover."
The taller man snorted and turned to walk back to his table. "I am surprised that he let you get away with it."
"Actually, he didn't. I just ran like hell after that."
Inwardly, Crawford frowned. Somewhere between the bouts of dry grins and empty words was a little boy no older than 10, yet no younger than 60. He didn't know what to make of Ken's irony-soaked words.
Hell, he didn't even know what to make of Ken.
He considered his options, but decided that it was of greatest urgency to get Ken off his carpet so he could have it sent for cleaning immediately. Emotional stains can be scrubbed off days, or even years after they appear. Perhaps they might be harder to remove with time – a trivial matter as long as they can be removed one way or another. Regrettably, only one of those truths applied to carpets.
"Go to the bathroom and clean yourself up, Ken. You're making a hideous mess all over the place." He did not look to the boy when he spoke.
"Yeah, yeah – fussy bastard," Ken grinned around the words as he made his way to a door on the left side of the room.
He paused to mutter before closing the washroom's door – "Carpet-loving freak."
Click.
Crawford inhaled, then breathed out an answer to no one but himself:
"I heard that."
-@-@-@-@-
Was there really so much blood? Certainly those shoes were old, and they had a tendency to absorb rainwater whenever he walked in the puddles, but…
Ken kicked off his shoes, scrunching up his nose as he accidentally stood on a blob of half-dried blood which he had managed to kick off from the sole of one shoe. In respond he stripped off his jacket and dropped it over the bloody mess, his crimes hidden from the naked eye by the brown leather. He raised an impassive eyebrow while a thin, snaking crimson trail appeared from under the jacket and wove its way around the outlines of the tile flooring.
That might explain why Crawford was so annoyed.
It might also explain the squishy noise his shoes made when he walked off the carpet. He deliberately chose the carpet as his standing spot – half in a bid to rile Crawford…
The other half was to see how much blood he spilt tonight.
If he had donated all that, he might have saved a few lives already.
Of course, there were no second chances. The lives that might have been saved would not have been the ones that he was destined to take. These would be different lives that were still beating and breathing before he arrived and would still be after he walked past.
His was an equation that added no value to the sum of all.
He peeled his bugnuks off, flexing his fingers as he did so to rid his hands of the sticky sweat which they became soaked it from his exertions.
For a moment he thought he saw white, pristine hands – like those of a child's. They were the sort of hands that you would find pressing together a sandcastle, playfully kneading dough into cookies, and the hands that mothers would hold while they plant a goodnight kiss upon your forehead. Then he remembered that he had burnt those hands beyond recognition a very long time ago.
He looked down at his hands again; it took his mind a while to realise that the sticky feeling was not sweat, but blood.
A sharp, sudden inhale.
Then confusion.
His bugnuks were not damaged – there was no way the blood from his victims would spill into them.
So where had the blood came from?
A click.
Footsteps resounding along the tiles.
A soft, moulding pressure against his back, followed by a warm breathe weaving its way through the hair at the top of his head. Then Crawford reached forward and turned on the tap.
The sudden splash of water against the ceramic basin cut through the silence in the air – a gurgling, rushing sound that was both harsh and soothing at the same time. He waited for an indication from the boy to show that he had awakened from his private world.
He did not require any verbal cues from Ken, knowing that the boy had stirred the moment his shoulders lost some of their tension. Stretching his hands forward, he applied sufficient pressure to push the boy's hovering hands into the pool of clear water where he began rubbing away at them. Water continued to flow out from the basin, though at a seemingly non-existent pace due to the pressure of the water coming out from the tap.
"You lied," there was no accusation in the man's even tone. "You are hurt."
Ken looked down at the two pairs of hands held together in the sink. Enveloping them was a pool of red that never seemed to drain away and instead seemed to be filling the sink at an alarming rate. Ken thought to lower the water pressure by twisting the tap to let the red liquid discharge properly, and began to raise his hand to do so.
The raven-haired man behind him knew what Ken intended, but he did not oblige him. Far from that – he took the boy's hands into the curve of his palms before he pulled them forward and directly under the torrent. The icy burst upon Ken's injuries caused him to visibly recoil in pain.
Crawford held him fast.
"Dammit, Crawford – let go of me!" His struggles were at best half-hearted, having been considerably weakened by the mission and blood loss tonight.
Crawford did not let go.
The brunette made a few test jerks against the man's grasp, hoping to bump him loose in the process of it. After a few semi-valiant attempts he gave up, allowing Crawford to do as he pleased – he didn't need to add another notch to his cross tonight.
Silence always seemed to flow into the infinite at times like this.
"Ken," Crawford paused, waiting for the boy to realise that he had spoken, "look down."
And Ken did.
The blood was gone.
The boy's fingers twitched, pulling cuts and abrasions as they did so.
But the pain remained.
He bent forward and howled a feral, desperate cry, not ashamed to let the man feel his angry tears hitting their hands.
Crawford did not let go.
~ End
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