Bitter Nocturne
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

1st Movement: Something More Than Night

The phone call just put the cap on it: it was another one of those days.

If anyone were to ask Youji's opinion it was as much the fault of the weather as it was anything. The day showed gray through the shop windows, the sky was clogged with clouds like drifts of filthy city snow, and everything looked so dark and dreary the sun might as well have phoned it in. The women bundled themselves up in boots and scarves and heavy winter coats, and it was hardly worth the time to mentally peel away the wrappings in the hope of discovering a pretty one cocooned beneath it all. Custom was slow and time passed slower, and even the schoolgirls didn't seem inclined to dawdle.

It was getting too late for an afternoon delivery, but when the order came in Ken had said he'd take it round anyway. It wasn't like any of them had anything better to do…

The truly weird thing was that when the phone call came, he hadn't been worrying. He hadn't been anxious at all. God knew what he had told himself Ken was doing staying away so long, Youji only knew he wouldn't have blamed the kid for a minute if he'd decided not to hurry back. He must have told himself Ken had gone for a coffee or stopped for food. It was only exactly what he'd have done if he'd been doing a delivery on a day like this, when all he had to come back to was a near-empty shop and the pleasure of his teammates' company. Bad weather never did bring out the best in them.

In retrospect it was a terrible explanation, but at the time it was truly what he'd thought.

Yes, he knew a Ken Hidaka. But he couldn't have been injured – he was delivering flowers, for God's sake!

How much trouble could a guy get into delivering flowers? Youji had asked the woman on the telephone that – what, Ken's in hospital? What did he do this time? – and she had simply hesitated, then told him again that Ken had been attacked (attacked? The boy was an assassin, how the Hell could anyone—) and was in surgery, and that his injuries were serious but not life-threatening. He had asked the same thing to Omi as the boy scrambled into Aya's stupid Porsche, dumping a bag full of Ken's belongings down on what passed for the back seat beside him, though Omi hadn't known the answer either.

Now, standing in a too-bright room and gazing at Ken (looking younger and paler than Youji thought he had ever seen him, dressed in an oversized hospital gown and giving them a wan and weary smile more because he didn't know how else he should be looking at them than because he genuinely felt like smiling) it was all Youji could do not to ask him the same thing.

"Who," he said, because he had to say something, "do you think you are, Lucy Westenra or something?"

But the blood they were giving him back was the blood of a stranger and, fresh from the freezer, it would be cold.

Ken really did not look good. If there was one thing an ordinarily healthy-looking kid like that didn't take to, it was pallor. He hardly looked like himself at all. Maybe it was his attitude, maybe the way he held himself but it was easy to forget just how small a guy Ken really was until you saw him like this. Saw him lying too still and too quiet, almost lost against a clutter of pillows and a tangle of tubing in a bed that seemed too large for him, and gazing at nothing with a vague, half-distracted look in his eyes as if he were having difficulty focusing. Worse, Ken looked drained, as if even raising his head would have been too much for him…

He hadn't understood, Youji could see that in his eyes. From somewhere by his side he thought he heard Omi, his head bowed as he crouched on the floor and placed Ken's nightclothes in the bedside locker, sigh.

Ken just looked at him. He said only, "I hurt my back."
"Your back?" Youji echoed. "How'd that happen? I thought—"
"I fell," Ken said. He pulled a face. "Must have. Don't remember. I—" He broke off, as if he didn't know what he was supposed to say next. Swallowing, Ken gazed down at his bedsheets, at his left hand lying palm-up and the IV line that skewered his wrist. "I did something, they… don't think it'll last but they can't say, not before the swelling goes. They… I fell, it's my fault—"
"Spit it out, Ken."
Ken squeezed his eyes closed, just for a second. He said, "I can't walk. I – Christ, Youji. They said I couldn't even stand. I… I don't know what to do, tell me what to do!"

Youji stared at him. He knew he should be trying to console his friend. Knew damn well what he should do now was say something comfortable and safe – doctors always fear the worst, Kenken, you're going to do just fine – but there were no words. Everything sounded so trite, so silly, and no comfort at all. Dammit, this would have been so much easier if Ken'd only had the grace to be a pretty girl…

(The rest of it – the thick crepe bandages wrapped about the length of his right arm, the gauze pad taped to the side of his throat, barely seemed to matter. They were just details, unimportant ones at that. Ken couldn't walk—)

So he just stared. Ken – and if he wasn't about to cry, he certainly hadn't been that dejected over Gamba Osaka getting knocked out in the third round of the Emperor's Cup – Ken was really looking for him to say something reassuring, but when the only thing that came to mind was 'Well, maybe Kritiker won't pull a "He knows too much" and just put you at a desk', horrified silence was almost a better idea. Okay, he could go with that. Maybe Omi would pick up the slack.

"Well," he said, "I hope you get better. Because I don't think you wanna find out what our retirement plan's like."
"What?" Ken blinked. He stared at him. Well, good. Ken made more sense angry than drowning in self-pity. "Youji, if I heard that right I'm gonna break your jaw."
"Kenken, if you think I'm bending over so you can punch me, you must have hit your head harder than I thought."

Ken glared groggily at him, raised one finger in salute then slumped back against the pillows; for a moment there was nothing more. Just the grumble of traffic and, somewhere just beyond the door to Ken's room, the quiet sounds of the hospital as it wound down for the night; a door creaking closed, the quick, purposeful steps of a nurse, and the rattle of bottles and jars on an overburdened trolley. A sudden slam broke the imperfect silence: Omi had pushed closed the closet doors. Now the boy was scrambling gracelessly back to his feet, placing one hand on Ken's shoulder. Ken blinked, glancing up at him: probably no bad thing when Youji hadn't quite been able to keep himself from giving Omi a sidelong glance. About time you filled in, kiddo, I was beginning to think I'd have to do it…

"Try not to worry so much, Ken-kun," Omi said. "And don't give up. You can still move, right?"
"Kinda," Ken said quietly. He seemed to be having difficulty keeping his eyes open. "I… gotta stay in bed. Doctor said six weeks."
And Omi smiled, and his smile was bright and midsummer-warm. "You can manage that, can't you? Look, you can still move – that's already a good sign, and you'll only get better as the bruising heals. I don't think six weeks in bed means missing much at this time of year, and when it's over with any luck you'll be fine. You can cope with that, right, Ken-kun?"
"I guess," Ken said. He didn't sound very sure.
"I'm sure you're going to get better," Omi told him. "I can't believe you'll settle for any less, will you?"
"And to think," Youji lamented, raising his eyes heavenward, "I'd be glad for the excuse for a six-week lie-in. This is wasted on you, Hidaka, absolutely—"
And realized that Ken wasn't listening. "Who's there?"

There were strangers in the corridor, talking low and clipped and urgent: a young man's voice – it sounded an awful lot like Aya's – raised as if in protest, then a woman's, brisk and cool and only utterly professional, cutting him off. Youji strained to listen, but it seemed he'd tuned in five minutes too late. For a moment nobody spoke at all, then Aya pushed open the door and, in a curiously old-world gesture that seemed somehow out of place from him, held it open for a young woman before slipping quietly through after her. For all the narrow wire-framed glasses, the gray pants suit and the boyishly short black hair, it was Birman all right.

Birman and, following in her wake, a brace of detectives, one old and one young just like in the movies. She glanced over at Ken, nodding almost imperceptibly. Play along, the look in her eyes said. We'll square it all at our end…

"Ken," Aya said. "The police are here."
"The police?"

Once again, Ken hadn't understood at all.

"They need you to tell them who attacked you."

How much trouble could a guy get into delivering flowers? Right now the answer was plenty. Ken was a man doing a job, a job that brought him into other people's homes and businesses, and that was all he'd had to be. Insofar as there was a pattern, he had fit it.

Five people had been killed so far, starting with a postal worker, then a college student working for a noodle bar whose sole selling point was offering free deliveries in a three-mile radius. The press had caught on with the third victim, a babysitter found dead in a rented apartment in Nakai. She was a high-school student, an unremarkably cute sixteen-year-old subsidizing a shopping habit, but it had been the last victim they'd really gone crazy for. Mackenzie Martin. She'd been an Australian, a pretty blonde graduate who had come to Japan to teach conversational English, who had turned out to be supplementing her paltry wages by giving private lessons under the table. She'd left her apartment one evening three weeks previous, telling her roommate she was going to meet a friend in Omotesando. They'd found her body in a Shinagawa goods yard four days later, throat ripped open as if she had been savaged by a wild animal.

And last night there'd been Ken, his arms full of funeral flowers, walking blindly into the same trap and God only knew how come he alone had been spared to stumble out again. Ken isn't an assassin any more, Birman's presence had murmured. He isn't a dead man walking. Right now he's just an ordinary shop boy who was assaulted while doing his job, and he's the best lead we have.

Best lead, huh? That was a joke. Youji had been there when Ken gave his statement and the kid barely remembered where he'd been, let alone what had happened. The only thing he could tell them that they hadn't already known was there was a woman involved and there was always that, in Youji's experience, somewhere along the line…

The shop seemed quieter without him.

"Oh, Ken-san isn't here today…"
"Of course he's not, didn't you hear? He's in hospital! The vampire killer attacked him!"
"God, Toshi-chan, are you serious?"
"It's true! I saw the news last night, and I knew it was him!"
"That's so scary! Is he going to be all right?"

The girls at least missed Ken: to everyone else he was just another piece of office gossip and by sundown they were already starting to forget him. The midday news led with the story that another body had been found, a man who could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty who had been attacked walking home from a bar. Identification was proving difficult. Investigators, said the reporters, believe there may be a link between the murder and the attack on an eighteen-year-old shop boy in Shibuya ward yesterday evening…

Ken became a footnote to a graver, more glamorous crime. Survivors were good in theory but not when the police refused to give their names, still less interview rights.

And nothing happened. An enterprising reporter had shown up at half past two and Aya had headed him off through a combination of icy looks and deliberate obstructiveness: demotic Fujimiya for 'no comment'. That had been over an hour ago and nothing had happened since save for the girls showing up, all school plaid and loose socks and glossy hair, and all of them strangely subdued. One of the braver ones shyly handed Youji an envelope and asked if he could give it to Ken next time he saw him, if it wasn't too much trouble. Weird how the day seemed to drag, stuck in the shop with Aya for company; weird how much busier it seemed.

Youji hadn't really noticed it before, but in his own way Aya was every bit as lazy as he himself was. The guy just sloped in, propped himself up against the wall and stayed there. If he was practicing for the All-Japan All-Comers Glaring Competition he was doing great, but as far as attracting actual customers went it lacked something.

It didn't stop her, though. It would have taken a lot more than the new guy to intimidate her.

Youji was glad when the girl came in. She stood by the display cases, feigning an interest in an arrangement of roses and lilies as she quietly waited for her presence to be noticed – and it had been, of course, but Youji saw no harm in letting her wait a little longer. It would, after all, give him a little longer to admire the view and after a whole afternoon stuck with nothing easier on the eye than Aya and his godawful sweater, he figured he'd earned it. She was a pale girl, cold as moonlight and easily as beautiful; but she knew it and, if Youji were any judge, she was playing up to it. After that she didn't seem quite as interesting.

Easy, then, to look at her objectively. She was a lily of a girl, tall and pale and graceful, and her eyes were intelligent, but she wore too much black and held herself in a manner that was far too studied. She was the kind of woman who expected to be looked at and took it as her due: Youji couldn't exactly object to that, but it could get a shade wearing.

Moments like this he felt the loss of Ken keenly. He couldn't exactly ask Aya what he thought of the loligoth thing.

Better get on with it, then. He clambered to his feet, waving Aya warningly away from the girl never mind that he hadn't been going to approach her in the first place, and drew over to her side.

"Can I help you, miss?"

And she really had been looking at the flowers after all, because she started when she heard him speak.

"Oh! Oh of course, yes." Her voice was pleasant, if low. "I was wondering if it was too late to order an arrangement?"
Youji smiled at her, and his smile was lazy and practiced. "For you," he said, "I'm sure we can find time. I would never forgive myself if I let down such a beautiful girl."
"Oh, I'm sure you could have made it up to me somehow." She had a nice smile, too, but the look in her mismatched eyes said it meant no more to her than it did to him. "Anyway, I was looking for something in white."
"White? What's the occasion, a wedding?"
"No," the girl said, "Not a wedding. It's for a… an acquaintance. They're not well. I thought something like that?"

She jabbed one slender finger toward the displays, singling out a symphony in sad greens and whites. A traditional bouquet standing in a tall white vase, all crisp white roses and stock and Casablanca lilies, sprays of tiny daisies and fronds of fern. ¥12,950 with a ribbon of the customer's choice, delivery not included.

Aya had assembled one of those only last night. Delivery for an Ai Tanaka, Room 802, Mets Shibuya Hotel.

"Like that?" Youji asked. "Well… yeah, it's a pretty arrangement, but it might be a bit somber for a sickroom."
"You think so?" She sounded genuinely surprised.
"Yeah, I think so. That's a sympathy bouquet. That whole shelf is funeral flowers. You'd probably be fine sending those if you're buying them for a close friend and you know their tastes, but— okay, put it this way. How well do you know the recipient?"
She hesitated, averting her eyes and anxiously rubbing her upper arm. "Not… not well at all. We only met briefly."
"In that case you'd be better off with something more conventional. Look here." Youji led her to the next cabinet along, gesturing to a shelf overburdened with vases of flowers in paintbox hues. "We sell a lot of these as get-well gifts. Most people favor bright colors if they're trying to cheer up a hospital room."
"Well…" She smiled, meeting his eyes. "Okay, I'll take your word for it. What would you recommend?"

But she didn't like the basket arrangements, and the gerberas she thought were tasteless. Bright she could handle as a concept but magenta and orange daisies was pushing it. Okay, Youji said, what about a Summer Color arrangement? He pointed to a yellow and orange confection in a round glass vase. Something like that would make an excellent get-well present, and there was quite enough white and green in hospitals already without adding more.

"Are those lilies?" the girl asked. "I didn't know they came in yellow."
Youji nodded. "Yeah, those are Canada lilies. It's kind of a shame lilies are so associated with funerals, there's a lot more to them than that. They come in pink too, you know?"
"I never knew that. I – well, I'd heard of tiger lilies of course, but I always thought of them as so…"
"Severe?" Youji asked.
At that the girl gave a giggle, hiding a smile behind one pale hand. "Well, maybe… I was going to say sophisticated. I never really cared for bright colors much."
"Really? That's kind of a pity. I think you'd find they suited you."
"I don't think so." But she was blushing slightly, tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. "How much would that be?"

She seemed surprised when Youji told her that for an extra ¥1,250 they could arrange for an evening delivery, since she probably wouldn't want to wait around for the arrangement to be ready. Clearly this girl was far more used to receiving expensive flowers than giving them.

Maybe she just didn't know what she was doing, but who spent ¥9,000 (not including delivery charge at ¥1,250) on an ill acquaintance, anyway? She really couldn't know what she was doing. Sure, a sale was a sale and it wasn't like Youji was going to tell her otherwise – and he could only blame Ken for that. Back injury or not, he didn't like to imagine what the kid would have done to him if he found out someone had come in looking for an expensive arrangement and left with a bunch of daffodils. Still, it seemed a bit excessive when there were cut flowers right there…

"You get a gift card with that," Youji said as he rung up her order, gesturing with his uncapped pen to a display rack stood by the register. "No extra charge. You want to include a card?"
For a moment he didn't think she would respond. She simply stood and fumbled her purse back into her shoulder bag, then nodded. "Yes," she said, then again more decisively: "yes. That one."

Youji glanced down at the display stand to make a note of the card's number, quirking one slender eyebrow in a silent statement when he realized which one she had chosen. Number eight, a pure white affair with a thin silver border and a stylized graphic of an arum lily running up one side. There was no other decoration aside from the five elegant silver characters printed along the top right hand side.

What on Earth did this girl think she was playing at?

"Miss," Youji heard himself saying, "are you sure? Those are really meant for funeral flowers—"
"That one," the girl said again. "And don't worry about a personal message. Just the card will be fine."

No name?

No, she said. No name. And turned to leave.

"Wait," Youji said. "You didn't mention a delivery address—"
The girl just smiled. "They're for your friend. The dark-haired boy. Tell him I hope he feels better soon."

"What'd you mean," Ken asked, "strange?"

Ken had known something was on Youji's mind from the minute he sat down. The man's smile was that one little bit too broad, his enquiries as to how Ken was (lousy, but 'okay' would cover it) and how his day had been (boring) were that one bit too perfunctory and when Ken asked how things had been at home he answered well enough, but seemed distracted. Youji fidgeted as he sat down, absently raking his curls out of his face, then doing it again when they all fell back into place almost immediately. He never did quite know what to do with his hands when he was feeling anxious, but couldn't allow himself to smoke.

Youji may have been an accomplished liar, but Ken had seen his nonchalant act far too many times to be fooled by it any more. He might as well, Ken thought, have written 'I need a cigarette' on his brow and had done with it.

"They miss you," Youji was saying. "You better get well soon, or we're gonna have a lot of disappointed girls around…"
Ken said, "What's up? You're acting weird."

Half-screened by Youji's hands, almost as if he were ashamed of them, there was a bowl of cut flowers resting on his knees. He didn't quite seem to know what to do with the flowers either, but as if in response to the question, he thrust the bowl into Ken's blanket-covered , tulips and Monte Cassino: that would be a deluxe Summer Color arrangement by the looks of it, its rather fussy flourishes bearing all the hallmarks of having been assembled by Aya's hands. What, Ken wondered, did that have to do with it?

"That's why," Youji said, rather gratuitously Ken thought.
This didn't help much when he still had no idea what the flowers were supposed to have to do with anything. "What the Hell are you talking about?"
"You mentioned a girl last night," Youji said. Then when Ken sighed, slumping back against his pillows and raising his eyes heavenward: "No, shut up, I know what you're about to say and you can spare me it. What did she look like?"

Ken hesitated, gazing down at the flowers. They were still simply lilies and tulips: just flowers. They told him nothing.

He said, "You think she bought these?"
"If the girl you saw last night was slightly taller than you, had a hime cut and wore too much black, then yes. Oh, and her eyes were different colors. One's gray and one's a sort of pale blue."
"Huh." Ken frowned, an expression which in him implied nothing but thought. "Well… could be. Don't know about the haircut but she definitely had something up with her eyes. Why'd you think she'd send me flowers, though?"

The question had seemed only reasonable to Ken, but from the look on Youji's face, the way he raised his head as if he had been surprised in the middle of a daydream, it had caught his friend off-guard.

"I don't know," Youji admitted. "She was a… a strange sort of girl."
"What'd you mean, strange?"
"Would you attack a guy then walk into the place he worked to say Hi to all his friends?"
"Well… no," Ken said. "No, I wouldn't do that. Did she say anything?"
Youji sighed, raking his hair from his face again and holding it there for a second. "Just the usual. I thought maybe she wanted to leave a message, but… Ken?"

Ken was thinking of something else. He'd glimpsed a flash of silver and white, half-hidden beneath the gaudy petals of the lilies. A card. Why a card? If she'd left no message what did she want to bother with that for? Curious in spite of himself, Ken pulled it free, carefully tugging it out with fingers that were professionally courteous of flowers, and felt himself starting to frown. Type eight, huh? But those were for funerals – at any rate, for the relatives of the newly-dead. Was this some kind of joke? He turned it over in his hands, hoping to find something that would explain this to him, but there was nothing save the two words printed on the front.

I'm sorry, it read. Ken pulled a face and let the card fall onto the covers.

"Yeah," Ken said, "I bet she's fucking devastated."
Youji gave him an apologetic smile. "Sorry, Kenken. I just figured you should know."

He winced slightly as the legs of Youji's chair scraped against the floor, looking up at his friend in surprise as Youji got to his feet and, without being asked, lifted the flowers from Ken's lap. He placed the arrangement down by the windows, hesitating there for a second with his hands resting on the vase to gaze out at the world trapped just beyond it, and Ken watched him as he stood watching over nothing at all, and wondered what he was thinking.

"Anyway," Youji said over one shoulder, breaking the sudden silence, "it seems pretty damning to me. If she wasn't the girl she sure as Hell knows something. Too bad she didn't leave an address or a name or anything, I could have gone looked her up for you…"
"For me? Why'd you want to?" Ken asked. "It's none of our business, Youji. It's just dumb luck we're involved. If you're that sure it's her why don't you just call the cops?"
"And tell them what? A girl came into the shop and bought you flowers. That doesn't add up to anything the police can use and you know it. Sure, she knew you were the one who got hurt, but she could have found that out from any of the other girls. It doesn't have to mean anything."
For a moment Ken said nothing, just gave Youji a flat, wary look. "I thought you thought she was the same girl."
"I do, Ken. But they won't. You going to keep the flowers?"

It shouldn't even have been a question. Certainly Ken shouldn't have had to think about it. There'd been a girl with broken eyes and she had lured him into danger and apologized for it, then she had sent him expensive flowers from the store he worked in, as if she thought it would somehow make things better. What kind of a person did something like that?

He should have just thrown them out, he knew that, or given them away at the very least. And yet—

He said, "Yeah. I'll keep them."
"Really? You sure about that?"
"No," Ken said. "It just seems like the right thing to do."

All the way home Youji had – how to explain it? It sounded crazy, but he had the strangest sensation that someone was watching.

It wasn't quite midnight and the hospital was quiet, or as quiet as hospitals ever got. The lights in the corridor were lowered; a brace of young night nurses sat at the ward receptionist's desk thumbing through last month's ViVi, talking in whispers as they waited for something to do. In a quarter of an hour they would get up and, with a checklist and torch, they would go through the supplies in the crash cart. Until then there was nothing to do but read magazines and wait to be needed, and pretend that they weren't bored.

Ken, lying awake gazing at the still-unfamiliar hospital ceiling, listened to them talking without ever once hearing the words and wondered why everything felt so strange.

He had woken in pain, instinctively groping for the handset of the morphine pump. Now he lay with one hand curled about the button and wondered how long it would be before the pump's lock-out period ended and he could have another dose. Omi would have laughed if he'd only been here. Ordinarily the kid couldn't get Ken to take so much as a headache pill and here he was lying flat on his back thinking longingly about morphia…

Sleep came first, though. It had to. He wouldn't get better if he didn't rest and he wouldn't get any rest at all if his back didn't stop hurting. The drug was a necessary evil.

The nurses had set up the morphine pump earlier that afternoon: the lecture, he supposed, must have come with the handset. The point, or so Nurse Harada had told him, was to manage his own pain – but the PCA pump would only be as effective as he'd let it be. Don't you dare, she had said only half-jokingly, let me catch you trying to be brave about this! Ken had nodded obediently and promised that he wouldn't do anything of the sort, and wondered as he did so why nurses, like nuns, always left him feeling so confused and helpless.

Five minutes crawled past, then another five. Ken didn't try to be brave. In time the pain subsided, but the feeling of peculiarity and essential wrongness didn't. The room seemed strange somehow, in a way he couldn't quite define. It wasn't just because it wasn't his room and two nights weren't long enough to become accustomed to waking up there: there was something out of place, something he could sense shouldn't have been there even after a single night.

There was – wasn't there? – there was something odd about the quality of the shadows in the far corner of the room, if only he wasn't imagining it. They seemed (and even in his head it sounded crazy) somehow thicker than they should have been, as if there were something there, something that a less levelheaded soul might even have told themselves was the shape of a man.

If Ken had been the paranoid type, he might have fancied that even the silence felt wrong: there was something far too purposeful about it. It was the kind of silence you only got when someone else was trying very hard to be quiet. Might even have gone so far as to think he could feel the weight of someone's eyes upon him…

But Ken was Ken and he blamed the morphine, and the dream he already couldn't remember.

Sighing and turning over onto his side, Ken closed his eyes to search for sleep.

to be continued.