I do not own Weiss Kreuz or any of its characters. I am not receiving any profits from this story.

We all have our vices. Something to ground us in this insanity that is life. It's no different for assassins.

Ken has soccer. I'd be surprised if there was a moment in the day where Ken wasn't thinking about the game. In fact, it's so difficult to tear him away from a match, it would probably take Schwarz teleporting right in front of him to get him to pay attention to anything else.

For Omi, I think, it's his computers. It amuses me every time he berates Ken for "being involved in the game to the point of intoxication," and then going downstairs to write his new hacking program for the next few hours. True, Omi's computer skills come in handy on the job, but you'd be facing bodily harm in attempting to interrupt the Chibi when the he's writing code.

I myself prefer something more mind numbing. Vodka and cigarettes help to take the edge off when ghosts resurface, my liver and lungs be damned. Besides, you don't dream when you're shit-faced drunk, and that's always a nice change of pace.

But Aya? Some of our customers seem to think that his vice is being snarky. I'd be inclined to agree, but they hardly ever see the cup that's always sitting on the shelf under the register when he's in the shop and is rarely more than a few meters away from him when he is at home. Aya vehemently denies our accusations that he is addicted to coffee, then settles for cold glares and eventually ignores us when we try to press the point.

Sure, I like coffee. It tastes good and wakes you up from even the worst bitch of a hangover, but Aya takes it to an extreme. It probably wouldn't be so bad if he drank the instant stuff that Omi likes for his all-nighters, or even the roast that Ken and I drink. But apparently none of that has enough of a kick because he has to have Turkish coffee. The first time I saw him drinking the stuff, I had to ask why he was drinking brownie batter because, I kid you not, it was pretty much that color and consistency. This shit would probably give me a heart attack after just one cup. Now Aya, he doesn't drink it in the sake-sized cup that sane people use; he uses a French style coffee cup, the size of a soup bowl, and refills it at least three times daily. I don't know how he ever sleeps, though that might just be his aim in drinking so much of the stuff.

What really beats me, though, is that on longer missions where he has to go without for a day or more, he doesn't crash or suffer an aneurysm. Omi once suggested as an explanation that Aya has restraint and willpower beyond anything that I would ever know, though I don't recall if he meant it as a compliment to Aya's character or an insult to mine as I was quite drunk at the time.

Trying to wake myself up after another Saturday night of binge drinking, I sit in the kitchen, a cup of coffee positioned underneath my nose. I check the clock over the cup and I hear the door open and the bare whisper of Aya's footsteps on the stairs as he comes up for a refill. Right on schedule. I count down the seconds I have left to live, knowing that running, especially in my hung-over condition, will get me exactly nowhere. I carefully don't look up as Aya enters the kitchen and heads to the refrigerator where his single, nearly empty, bag of coffee was just a few minutes ago. God I hope his katana is still upstairs, because the stores close early on Sundays.