Thirty Pieces

By Lilimundi

Notes: There is strong sexual and violent content within, as well as AU elements. This story takes place during the second part of Kapitel and will go to the end of Kaptiel.

Chapter One

It was such a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the shop was busy, the girls were utterly gorgeous, and Tomoe Sakura was so cute and sweet that Yohji thought his teeth were about to rot out of his skull. All the hallmarks of a beautiful and wonderful day. Yep, nothing could ruin this, short of running into Manx right after smoking his last cigarette. Which was becoming a distinct possibility, given the lack of cigs in his pack. But he put all that out of his mind as he flirted with a tiny girl, perhaps around seventeen or eighteen, with hair bleached to the color of good honey and shockingly purple eyes. She had been looking at various flowers, from forget-me-nots to daffodils, and currently had her eyes on an arrangement primarily of heliotrope. Her head tilted slightly while looking at it. "It's a lovely arrangement."

Yohji couldn't resist. "The color pales next to your eyes."

Her lips quirked, amused. She hadn't once responded as a shrinking blushing virgin, which was encouraging of its own right. "And do you say the same to everyone with purple eyes?" She didn't quite look at Aya, but the insinuation made his own lips turn upwards. She lifted one eyebrow, a similar color to her hair which either said she dyed them too or the light color was somehow natural. "Or just to the attractive ones?" Again, her words seemed to point to the redheaded man.

"Only to beautiful women with such good taste." He snagged one heliotrope and held it next to her face. "This flower certainly compliments your beauty perfectly."

She laughed, shaking her head. "So the truth comes out! I'm actually getting this for someone, and I have... long since decided on the heliotrope. But good try." She smiled, an expression with too many teeth for her. "You don't need to try and snag my wallet and my groin in one go."

Yohji laughed as well, sliding the flower back where it belonged. "So I see. Well, Omi can ring you up. Yo, chibi!"

"Yes?" The young man looked up, and the girl pointed to the arrangement. "Ah, okay! Do you need that delivered?"

The girl nodded, wandering away from Yohji without a backwards glance. A lesser man would be upset about this, but Yohji was not this said lesser man. He was a gentleman, a man of great taste, a-

-paranoid man that just felt a dark shiver roll down his spine. Being an assassin meant that paranoia was something you ate for breakfast and drank at lunchtime, so Yohji's instincts crying out at him that something was wrong meant that something was about to go tits-up. He started to move towards the register, remembering that Omi hadn't quite recovered since the last mission. It hadn't been a bad break, but as the crutches sitting innocently beside his chair said, it was enough to hamper his movement. The crowd was thinning, as most of their loyal customers and fans were heading to school and work. Omi had just finished with the tiny girl and she was booking it out of the shop as if she felt it too.

And then Manx walked in.

Well, his instincts were never wrong. Just overdoing it this time. Manx's arms held a few business notebooks, when normally she'd enter with a portfolio with the current knowledge of their target. She was dressed attractively in a lovely blue shirt with black slacks, a black vest buttoned over her generous chest and a beret perched over her red curls. In fact, she looked downright casual, how she normally looked after a bad mission and she was catching up on how the team was recuperating. "Am I interrupting anything?"

Meaning, can the team close the shop while she interrogated them. Amazing how easy it was to decode the agent's causal question. "Nah," Yohji said with a shrug. "Yo, Aya, Ken. Boss lady."

The two Weiß members looked up from their work, a dark shadow passing over their normal facade. All three of them started towards Manx as Omi turned for his crutches when she waved a hand. "I only need to talk to two of you," she told them, giving a death glare to Omi as he continued to try and stand. "It's nothing we need to close the shop over."

That caused Yohji to pause. She never wanted to only talk to a few members of Weiß, unless... her eyes flit over to where they kept the books and he smothered a snicker. Very rarely, they actually had to go over the books with Kritiker, showing how far in the black they really were. The Koneko didn't ever turn a large profit, but taxes didn't stop for assassins by night, florists by day. He squeezed Omi's shoulder, subtly pushing him back into the seat. "Aya and I can take care of it," he assured the boy. "You and Ken take care of the lovely ladies."

Omi flashed him a grateful look as the bell tinkled once again and a tall fedora wearing adrogyne entered. The body was undeniably female, as Yohji happily noted, and while she was wearing very masculine clothing, she wore them well. She went to shopping as soon as she entered, barely turning to Omi and Ken's cheerful greeting. Yohji silently mourned the opportunity to speak with someone that attractive that stimulated both his overdeveloped heterosexual side and his insanely picky and currently sleeping gay side as he followed two redheads into the back room.

At least there wasn't a mission. His ribs still hurt from the last one.

---

Manx closed the book in front of her, satisfied. "I am always impressed how you're able to profit off this business," she told the men, looking at the two of them. "How is Bombay's leg coming along?"

"The cast should be off soon. He's been trying to keep it from atrophying too badly," Yohji told her as Aya put the book away. "Is there a mission?"

Her fingers drummed on the table, a brief look of frustration crossing the beautiful face. "There should be. You are keeping track of the Coin Killer?"

Both members of Weiß nodded. The news had been overrun by reports of a serial killer that seemed to pick targets randomly, but always left a silver coin laying in the wounds of the corpse. There had been four killings so far. It made Yohji squirm uncomfortably. "Is that our next target?" Aya asked, only his eyes giving away how much he was itching to get back into the field.

"Again, it should be. But this killer has had no trail. We've been unable to even match any fingerprints." Manx steepled her fingers in front of her, looking at them. "No forensic evidence has been found, and there's no link between victims. We're searching for other clues and possible connections, but so far, the only connection has been lack of weapons used and the coin."

"The last victim was shot," Aya pointed out, remembering what Omi had found out when he hacked into the police database. This rash of murders worried them all, and they had done as much research as they could for when they were finally officially given the mission. "And the woman had no coin."

"With his own gun. And we are assuming the man was the target, not the woman." Manx frowned, looking at them. "We're looking into possible... preternatural connections. But information from that community is slow and often unreliable. Who we've managed to contact are..." Manx winced, not quite wanting to say.

"Psychics and witches," Yohji supplied.

"As well as a few priests, both Catholic and Shinto. One had recommended an American wizard of all things, but we hadn't been able to get a hold of him. A Catholic priest seemed to be worried about the coins, but calmed once pictures were shown."

There were a few reasons a Catholic priest would be worried about silver coins, but it didn't seem it was the worst case scenario if he didn't continue to worry once seeing what the coins looked like. "The higher ups are laughing at you for playing with the phonies, aren't they?"

Manx gave the blond an unamused look. "Once we have an actual lead, we will pass the information on to Weiß," she said crisply, standing. "In the meantime, you will be given other missions. We will wait for you to recover, but we won't keep you on standby to solve this case."

"Understood." Aya didn't sound happy at this, however. Yohji couldn't blame him. The entire situation made him uneasy, and he wanted to get whoever was behind this and introduce hir neck to his wire.

"Hey, Manx? Omi needs to leave for school." Ken looked at the three, anxious. "Hey, is there a mission? You guys look..."

"No, there isn't," Manx told him. "I've finished my work here. How are you doing?"

Ken shrugged with one shoulder, trying to keep his battered shoulder still. He had come very close to breaking or dislocating something in that fall, but it was worth it when his target had been on the other end of his claws. "Healing. How about you?"

She smiled, walking past him. "Tired, but it's that time of year." She nodded to Omi as he came over to them, backpack already shouldered. "Take care, boys."

"Take care!" Omi chirped at her, his feelings for the closest thing he'd have in Weiß as a mother figure coming to the fore. "Oh, Yohji! Someone bought some flowers and left one for you." The slight disapproval wasn't masked, but it wasn't anything new. Women would buy flowers for the boys all the time, leaving them to have to tactfully discard of the items they had just sold. Omi nodded to the counter and the single white flower resting there.

A calla lily.

Something twisted inside his belly. Women had given him lilies before, but combined with the fact calla lilies weren't from the genus Lilium, the Coin Killer, and the dark feeling he had before Manx entered...

Not like she's even in Japan, he reasoned as he picked up the flower, watching Aya gather up his keys to take the young boy to school. Or if she was, she wouldn't come in here and leave me a flower after all these years.

Still, the calla lily rested in his hand, a lithe feminine shape with an amusing phallic pistil.