Genre: general
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Crawford, some AU-characters
Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz belongs to Takehito Koyasu and Project Weiss.
Status: complete
A/N: Why Crawford is Crawford. (Not mushy. Crawford doesn't do mushy.) I really can't imagine Crawford didn't have a team before Schwarz. So I wrote this. Spell-checked with MS Works.
I've been through a lot.
When someone regular says that, he's been through... What? Years in a prison, a murder or two, a dead kid and a bank robbery. A WW2, perhaps. Maybe he had a cancer and he survived it. Maybe he lost all his so-called friends. Maybe...
Anyone regular couldn't compare his experiences to mine.
I've killed many people with my teams. Some of them with my bare hands. Some of them with my gun. Some of them with things that were useful at the time - a kitchen knife, a shard of glass, a necklace...
I know a hundred ways to kill and I've used most of them. It seems it's time for me to start being creative. But I don't See that coming, so maybe I'm retiring.
The thing is, I don't See that either.
If things were different, I'd still have my old team. Flüstern. We used to be very effective, Estet only used us for "code red": when no one else was good enough, we stepped in. We came, killed, and left without leaving any traces behind us.
There were four of us, like usually in Estet's teams: me, Sergei, Nana and Thomas.
I was young then.
Sergei was Russian, and a pyrokinetic. He was quite strong, he could create fire. He had black eyes - and I mean black. You couldn't make any difference between his irises and pupils. He was bald, though, but it was understandable: he was... Over forty? I can't remember it so clearly anymore.
Nana came from India. She was transported to America when they heard I wanted a telepath to my team - she was the best at the moment and Estet thought I deserved only the best people to my team.
They would curse themselves now, if they were alive.
She was a passionate woman and one could see it. Her tea-coloured skin and warm brown eyes gave no hint about the coldness inside. Nana was a cruel woman: she loved to torture her victims, make them live their worst nightmares over and over again before she killed them.
I didn't care as long as she did her job.
Sergei and Nana became lovers, but they didn't let it affect our job. I appreciated that.
But sometimes I wondered... When you worked with Estet, love was only for fools. It didn't matter how much you loved someone, you'd only get a knife to your back sooner or later.
Then I realised they loved the risk.
I wonder what Thomas would be doing nowadays? He was the last one to join us. I couldn't believe my eyes when he came to my office, eyes cast downwards and a stupid-looking hat in his hands. "Mr. Crawford?" he said quietly, sounding very British. "I'm the new Empathic to your team."
"Hold up your head", I commanded harshly behind my desk. They couldn't be serious...
The young man lifted his head and I had to prevent myself from gasping. Thomas's eyes were empty. He looked at me, he saw me and recognised me, but his eyes were empty of any emotions. I understood why they had given this Empath to me.
Empathy is a powerful Talent. A man under great fear - or great pleasure - can't work decently. The Empath usually feeds the victims emotions, whatever they are.
Sometimes, however, the Empathy strikes back: everything you're trying to make your target feel hits you. It's a very forceful backfire, no matter how powerful you are. Rarely anyone survives without becoming a vegetable or dying.
But if that happens, they're very terrifying - a backslash can be effective only once.
Imagine you are free of all emotions: guilt, anger, fear, sorrow... Imagine what you can do to other people when you can feed their emotions without those emotions touching you at all. And if the backslash comes, it has no effect on you.
So, Thomas became a part of Flüstern.
Our lives under Estet's control were pleasant. I used my precognition to keep my team out of trouble. It wasn't anything evident, sometimes I'd just tell Sergei to avoid redheads, or Nana to keep her sharp tongue in her mouth. But it helped us to survive, and when you have a team you need to take care of it.
We'd been together years when the Elders suddenly called me one winter's day and told that they had prepared a new team for me.
I was astonished. There hadn't been any problems between me and my new team, why did they order me to take a new one?
The Elders answered me pretty coldly. "A dead team is a useless team." Then they dismissed me.
I should've known by then that the future is unstoppable: what the Elders had seen was most likely to happen.
Being confused and angry, I told my team about this. They listened to me looking very serious, then they promised to be extra-careful. Thomas watched me with no interest in his eyes. "Have you even listened what I've said?" I asked him.
"Yes", he said and nodded. "But Oracle... Do you think life is worth living?" After a minute's silence he answered for himself.
"I don't."
With that last remark he left the room and never came back. Elders never ordered anyone after him: they had known that they'd find Thomas's body from a small river nearby our base in Germany.
I didn't grieve after Thomas for he had always been distanced. But I almost missed his presence in our missions. I even believed I understood why he had killed himself: life without emotions could be horrible.
My team continued leaving me: I watched in horror as Sergei burst in flames and burned alive. Nana couldn't take it; she shot herself two weeks later. I was alone, again. Alone and on the verge of having a new team.
I made a decision, then: I would be as distanced as Thomas was. I couldn't risk making bonds with my team and then losing them.
So I turned to a bastard. I treated everyone like dirt, being as cold as I could.
It was difficult at first but I got used to it. I became my role. There was no Talent in Estet who didn't fear me and loathe me for my insensitivity. I even enjoyed it, knowing people's futures and using that knowledge against them.
I got my new team and I had to consider myself as a schwarz.
I was thoughtful when I one by one collected my people. They were all hurt by the world and bitter in their own way.
I would fit in just fine.
A/N: So? What do you think? What mostly concerns me, was it crawfordish?