Disclaimer: Kamen Rider belongs to Toei.

Interlude Two: In Ice

The thief waits nine days between killing the first scientist and the second one.

He needs the time to plan out what he's going to do. This next target's home is larger, more heavily defended, especially after he hears the news about the other scientist. That confirms that they're talking to each other between worlds, at least. There's no place that's so well-defended or well-planned that it can be kept safe from a master thief who's intimately familiar with the technology DaiShocker has available and has the ability to slip between worlds as needed, though.

(He doesn't care that nine days is the length of time they kept Kadoya Tsukasa alive. It's just the way things worked out.)

He kills everyone as he works his way into the building. He doesn't have a choice. Any alarm raised will give his prey an opportunity to escape, and he can't risk that.

The fact that most of the guards are monsters of one kind or another makes the task slightly easier, at least. Blood that isn't red reminds him less of things he's running away from.

It's two fifty-eight in the morning when he finally reaches the man's bedroom. He doesn't waste time between killing the last guard and charging inside. He won't give this man any opening to escape.

The scientist is already awake, cold eyes assessing the thief as the bedroom door flies open. The scientist has some kind of gun in hand, raises it to aim, but the thief's faster. Even with the simple mechanical gun that he carries on these missions, he's a better fighter than the madmen he hunts, and the scientist has two bullets in his right arm before his hand can bring the weapon to bear properly.

The man's smart, the thief has to give him credit for that. As soon as the shots have found their target, the scientist tries to run between worlds. The grey washes over the man as the thief's still running toward him, but that's all right.

The thief is very good at slipping between worlds, especially with all the new information he got from his last heist.

A quarry, a river, the darkness of an abandoned building, the stars at night in the desert, the center of a busy city, all flash around them as the man tries to run. He can't escape from the thief, though. The thief knows him, has every piece of information about the man that could possibly be gleaned, and the thief doesn't lose eye contact with his prey.

Eventually the scientist brings them back to the bedroom, and the thief smiles as he shoves the warm barrel of the gun between the man's eyes. "That was fun."

"Go to hell." The man's words are clipped, though he doesn't have an accent like the first one did. "I assume you're here to do to me what you did to Javier, monster?"

"Monster?" The gun slips down, placing another bullet through the scientist's left shoulder before rising again to point between his eyes. "You're calling me a monster? Why? Because I could travel between worlds better than you?"

"Because you murdered a friend of mine." The man's black eyes continue to be icy cold, and he does nothing to staunch the flow of blood from any of his wounds. "Because you came after him in the dead of night, killed his most loyal servants, and tortured him until he died in a puddle of his own urine. You're a monster."

"I learned how to travel between worlds from the best, you know." The thief won't answer the man's accusations. He won't think about the man's accusations, because that would involve thinking about other things that have happened. "Tsukasa chose me from my world. He brought me into DaiShocker. I got my abilities first-hand, from the source, without any… coercion being involved."

The thief's breathing too hard, has let himself get too caught up in things that don't matter anymore. His ability to travel between worlds is his, nothing more, nothing less, and the honing that he's done with it over the last few days was what allowed him to follow the scientist. Taking a deep breath and a step back, he smiles and settles his aim for a lower point on the man's face.

The scientist merely continues to stare at him, angry, bitter, vindictive, and powerless.

It's the powerlessness that the thief likes, though he wishes there was fear. That's all right, though. Eventually there will be fear. There's still plenty of time left in the night. "Tell me where your copies are."

"I don't know what you're talking about." The man's eyes don't flick away, don't look down, don't do any of the usual tell-tale signs of lying.

If the thief didn't know better, he'd actually believe the monster in front of him. "We can do this one of two ways. You can tell me now, and I can only torture you a little. Or you can refuse to tell me, and I can torture you a lot. Which do you prefer?"

The man doesn't answer.

That's all right. The thief doesn't mind doing what he has to.

He doesn't think while he works. He doesn't let himself listen to the man's voice, except for those times when he's asking for the information he needs.

(He doesn't hear their voices. The taped sessions don't matter.)

((Don't, Yuusuke… I'm sorry, Tsukasa, I'm sorry…))

He doesn't think about the color of the man's blood.

(It was all dark, anyway, by the time he returned to that place, dried into the carpet and onto the wall in shades of brown and black and deep maroon.)

He just does what he needs to do.

The scientist dies before giving him the information, and the thief spends ten minutes beating his knuckles bloody against the man's vacant eyes before making himself take a step back.

It's all right. It doesn't matter. Nothing that's happened and nothing that he's done matters.

It takes the thief ten minutes of pacing around the room, rubbing the blood off his hands on the wall, before he realizes what he needs to do.

He's been stealing things for years without always knowing exactly where the treasure lies or how to get it free. It takes him a few hours, but eventually he finds the safe, and he has enough experience and tools at his disposal to work his way inside.

The thief goes through all of the files once he's back in his lair, because there might be something new, something important that wasn't in the original set he stole.

Then he starts planning the next heist, because none of Shocker's various incarnations or people deserve to have the information they're trying to preserve.