Pairings: Yohji/Aya

Archive: Here, and my LiveJournal () If you decide you want to archive it, just tell me where it's going.

E-Mail: ravenwings@sailormoon.com

Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz and Weiss Kreuz Gluhen are the property of people other than myself.

Warnings: Introspective!Aya, Jaded!Yohji, and two beautiful guys being naked around each other.

A/N. I wrote this to try and understand Aya a little better. Personally, I find that I captured Yohji better…

This IS a Gluhen fanfiction. I trust all good Weiss fangirls and boys have seen all of it/most of it by now. While not necessary, it is helpful to have a basic knowledge of that whole Tsuji-sensei ordeal. It makes Yohji's actions in this fic a little easier to understand.

Also, this is an INTROSPECTIVE fic. Therefore, it doesn't go anywhere. Don't go into this expecting a great, detailed plot, because its not here.

Finally, thankyou very much to the wonderful Kasra, who gave me my title when I cried for help. Go read her story 'Talking to the Dead', it's beautiful.

Italics are flashbacks.

~~~~

I sat in the shower, something I only did when I was too wounded and tired to stand, or when I wanted to think. My long hair fell in wet clumps over my too-pale shoulders, and fanned out on the surface of the water pooled under my body. If I squinted just slightly, it looked like a red pool of blood, but that's just the killer in me speaking, the killer that sees death everywhere.

Why did I allow my hair to get so long anyways?

Today, Yohji and Ken returned from...well, wherever the hell it was they were sent to. I believe it was Europe, but seeing as neither has shown any inclination to talk about it, I'm not sure. Judging by their subdued, haunted eyes when they arrived, I don't think I ever will.

There was a time when they would have told me. I didn't even realise that I was so close to my teammates. I only realised when they were gone, which seems to be the way such things always go. Now I'm just Aya, sitting in the shower, surrounded like always by a pool of blood.

These last few years- has it really been four years? - have been somewhat...healing. Which is nothing short of strange. For two of those years I've been with Sena, and there's something refreshing about the boy.

He looks up to me. He's never judged me, just accepted me. While it's rather disturbing, he reminds me of Aya-chan, just without her innocence. He has her vitality, but he's stained with blood, just like me. Without my sister around though, he has become something of a substitute sibling. A little brother- someone to protect. A hope that one-day when I am old and retire, I can be normal. That is what is healing my mind, slowly, day by day.

I've even learnt to smile around him. It's cleansing.

But Yohji and Ken are back now, and with them they bring the memories of the me from four years ago. I was obsessed, a broken man, and while I still am to some degree, its something I don't enjoy remembering. Thus the shower, the burning need to be clean of that person, my old demons, and the memories of scarred hands stroking my own scarred skin in the depths of the night.

I stood up and turned off the shower. The wet strands of my long red hair clung to my body, and I still feel like I am covered in blood, sin, and my old obsessions. Just another reminded of my corrupt soul, doomed for eternity.

I stepped out of the shower and began to fill the large, traditional-looking bath with its modern plumbing. Perhaps this would help me feel clean again, where the shower had failed. Behind me the door opened and I whirled around, instincts flaring.

It was only Yohji, staring at me with those awful, haunted green eyes, and I relaxed. I was completely unfazed about my state of undress- after all we had all seen each other naked at some point in our careers while patching one another up. Besides that there had been those other times after missions, where we had to remind ourselves of our humanity, remind ourselves that we could still touch and feel...but those times are gone now.

His eyes flicked to the bath, then back to me. "Mind if I join you?" he asked in that smooth, deep voice. It didn't contain the sultry tone it once had, which only demonstrated to me how much the last few years have taken their tole on him.

I shrugged. "Suit yourself." I said quietly, hoping he wouldn't, before lowering myself in.

He joined me a moment later, just fitting, and I covered a flinch. I was sharing bath water with one of the people I was trying to cleanse myself of. That somehow defeated the purpose.

"So, how's it been, Ayan?" he drawled slowly, sinking into the water beside me. There was weariness in his voice that he tried valiantly to disguise, and I noted somewhat gleefully, though I'd never let it show. So, it seemed as if he wasn't going to fall back into his old habits of debauchery and drinking. He seemed a lot wiser. Perhaps these four years had been cleansing for him too.

I didn't dignify him with a reply. My hair was still floating around me like blood, and I reflected that I should have tied it up. I still didn't feel clean.

He cocked a light eyebrow at my lack of response. How amusing, he lightened his eyebrows with his hair. When I first met Yohji, his hair was a long and waving chestnut brown. Six years after that first meeting, it had become closely-cropped and white-blond. Trying to bleach away your sins Yohji?

"No reply? Would you prefer I called you Aya? Or are you Ran now?"

"Yohji, why are you here?" I asked bluntly. "You had a shower as soon as you got here from the airport."

He looked startled that I had taken the time to notice, and I smirked inwardly. Score one for me. Now get out of my bathtub.

Yohji was not to be dissuaded though. "How could I pass up an opportunity to spend time with a beautiful creature such as yourself?" The words contained only a shadow of his former charm, and I could see that he was mocking himself as much as he was mocking me. When had he become so bitter inside?

I stood up abruptly, hair immediately sticking to me. I needed to cut it off one day, preferably soon. "Find someone else to play games with." I informed him. "I'm not in the mood."

He grabbed my wrist. "Aya- Ran- wait. Just please...stay near me." He looked at me, those dark green eyes probing my own. I could tell by the colour that he had taken his contacts out, and I wondered why. For the majority of the two years I had worked with him, he had worn the things 24/7. He explained to me once as we lay together after a mission, drawing lazy circles around my navel with his scarred fingers.

"I started wearing the contacts permanently, because when I took off my glasses and put them in, it meant I was going on a mission. If I worse them all the time, it cut that out, made one less reminder of our jobs." He had smiled crookedly at me then. "Now I can even look at ads for contact lenses without cringing."

He kissed me then. "And now I have another way to forget."

I looked into those unmasked eyes, seeing the pain contained within them, and I sat down with a sigh. "Fine."

We lay there, sides touching, floating in the cooling water in silence. Then Yohji reached out and grabbed a strand of my hair, winding it around his fingers. "This is pretty." He murmured, letting the strand drop, and picking up a handful. "But it's like holding blood in your hand."

I felt the inexplicable urge to cry. "We're never going to escape the past are we?"

He smiled bitterly. "Never. Besides, seems like our past is our future...if I had a chance, I think I'd just get rid of it all."

"All of it, Yohji?"

He reached out, cupping my chin and turning my head towards him. I looked at him impassively while he searched my eyes for whatever it was he was looking for. A flicker of abject misery crossed his face. He didn't answer, instead leaning in and brushing his lips gently over mine.

The kiss was soft, sweet and gentle, completely opposite to the bruising intensity of our past ones. At those times, we had been trying to remember we were alive, and had wanted the pain. This time we were remembering what we once had.

Yohji broke it first, gaze flicking somewhere to the right, and he smirked bitterly. He gently ran his scarred fingers across my lips. "That's all I wanted. Just making sure you remembered me, Ayan." He stood up and grabbed a towel from the rack, wrapping it around his waist and grabbing his clothes. "You're right- we'll never escape our past." And he left.

I stood up as well. I wasn't mad- I understood why he did it. He wanted to know if it was possible to escape the past, a past that we had shared together. That one kiss had brought with it the memories we both shared, of bitter nights together after bitter death. He had received his answer- there was no escape.

I felt dirtier then than I did when I first came into the bathroom to get clean.

~~~

Thankyou for reading. Comments and constructive criticism are appreciated. ^_^