Title: Dire Consequences 10/??

Fandom: Viewfinder

Pairings: Mik/Fei overall

Disclaimer: I do not own Viewfinder or any of its characters. This is a fanfic and I'm not making any profit from it.

Rating: R

Part 10

The rain had stopped and dawn was in the air. Dark, swollen and bruised; the heavy clouds were moving apart to reveal a red horizon and allow its light to fall upon the abused, ominously quiet earth.

Hours. It had been hours now; hours of waiting, of not knowing, of negotiating, and each second was like an eternity when he did not have a single one of them to spare.

Mikhail Arbatov stared at the telephone with bloodshot eyes, unblinking as he waited for it to ring. His hands trembled and he clasped them together in front of his face to keep them still. Asami was behind this, he knew it, because it was impossible that he wouldn't be. In the midst of all his careful planning, of all his daring, his triumph and success, he had overlooked the single most important thing.

The depth of Feilong's obsession. The power of this… darkness, this madness, that his dragon called love.

Of course, Feilong would not sit by quietly. Of course, he wouldn't just let Asami slip through his fingers, this time probably forever, after he had been so close to… to whatever it was that he had hoped to achieve by baiting the man. Did he think if he hurt him enough and humiliated him, he would finally show Asami how strong he was and that he was finally worthy of his attention? Perhaps even worthy of his love?

Of course he had gone after Asami on his own, because he would have understood that he could not count on his organization for this. His pride would not have suffered it, to have them know that he had lost both the deed and the infamous Takaba Akihito. That he had been outwitted and outmatched on his own front, on his own ground, in a battle that he himself had started with a totally misguided, miscalculated risk.

Of course, he would rather face death than the humiliation living to see the next day dawn on a defeat as profound as this one was, without at least putting up one, last fight.

Ignorant little fool.

Mikhail smashed his fist on the tabletop and cursed himself. How could he not have foreseen this? He had only his own vanity to blame, because subconsciously, he could not bear to think of Feilong with another man, no matter how doomed that relationship was. The reality of Feilong's feelings was too distressing for him to acknowledge, because when he tried, when he remembered Asami and the way Feilong's entire face changed at the mention of his name; how his body shuddered and his dark, beautiful eyes widened, becoming vulnerable and injured for just a moment, before they hardened into two splendid gems of hatred and pain; his own chest felt constricted and he could not breathe from sheer agony.

He had thought only of the future, never of the present, focused on the day when he would have his precious dragon trapped, caged and alone, and when he would purge every last thought of Asami from his heart, mind and body. When he would break him, only to put him back together again and teach him to love once more.

An antique styled clock ticked on the wall, breaking the otherwise perfect silence and Mikhail could not bear the constant reminder of the passing time. Roaring in frustration, he snatched it down and hurled it at the wall; getting little satisfaction from seeing it shatter. The door opened and Yuri stared at him in shock.

"Mikhail…"

"What do you want?" Mikhail yelled, spinning around like a storm to face him.

Yuri regarded him coolly, his lips curling in disdain at the disreputable sight of him.

"Temper, temper, my boy," he reprimanded as he stepped into the room, much to Mikhail's irritation.

"I really, really don't want you around me tonight," Mikhail said through clenched teeth, very much on the edge and about to lose control.

"Why not?" Yuri sneered. "So that you can go on with this stupidity unchecked?"

"It has been a long time since you had the power to check any action of mine, uncle," Mikhail said. "I will do as I please."

A flash of malice raced over Yuri's face, so fleeting and quick that Mikhail would have missed if he hadn't known it would be there. Anger, hate and resentment. He saw it, only because he had been aiming for it. He enjoyed it and fed on it; throwing the man's greatest discontentment in his face and watching it eat away at him.

It was nothing, but just compensation for what Yuri had done to him when he'd had the power to do it. The power that he no longer possessed.

"I will at least say my mind," Yuri said, composing himself quickly enough.

There was something dry, raspy in his voice; a steady monotony to his tone, a hiss that whispered beneath his words like the quicksand of an hourglass and very little that he said was anything other than judgment and malcontent.

"Then, by all means, speak quickly!" Mikhail roared. "And get out of my sight when you are done!"

Pity he couldn't kill him. Pity he couldn't at least banish him from his life. Pity he was the only family that he still had alive.

"Twenty seven million?" Yuri said incredulously. "You are letting them wire out twenty seven million? Mikhail, are you out of your mind?"

"I assure you, I am perfectly sane!" Mikhail snapped, though he looked anything but in possession of his senses. His hair had gone wild in a flame of dishevelled curls, his eyes were bloodshot and raw, his clothes unbuttoned and his face distorted in rage. "I love him. I want him. I need him. My entire body yearns for him and I do not sleep at night, thinking of him, my mind plagued by the memory of his face both in waking and in sleep, so do you honestly think I give a shit about money in the face of the slightest chance that I may still get him back?"

"Even if you do get him back alive," Yuri said, his lips curling in a sneer, "what makes you think you'll get him back unharmed? Feilong is pretty enough. Arrogant enough. If I was Asami, I know what I would do with him and it would not be nice. Are you sure that you would still want him then? Wouldn't it be better to see him dead, rather than to get him back so defiled?"

Mikhail snarled and lunged forward, snatching Yuri's collar and slamming him into a wall.

"Shut up!" he breathed heavily, their faces only centimetres away. "Just… shut up! You fucking bastard… Minute after minute, hour after hour, I think of him with that… that man! The least I can expect is to now find him dead and yet it keeps playing out in my head… that single scene, like a bad movie… like a broken record. Asami touching him. Asami having him. Asami's hands on his precious, white skin. His lips on his pale, tearstained face…"

He closed his eyes and shuddered deeply. It took him a long moment to recover and when he did, he threw Yuri across the room, making him stumble and sprawl backwards on the floor.

"Get the fuck out of here," he ordered in a low, barely controlled voice. He made his way back to the desk and sat down to stare at the phone once more. "Or I'll do something that the both of us will later regret."

Visibly shaken, Yuri raised himself into a sitting position and straightened his collar, dusting his coat with trembling hands. Mikhail had his eyes closed; no longer paying him any heed and it angered him beyond endurance to know how little he mattered in his nephew's life since his coming of age, when he had grasped full control of all of his assets. As his legal guardian after his parents' death, Yuri had been the god of Mikhail's world; a firm, relentless lord, who now found his massive fall from power very hard to take.

His thin mouth curled in a bitter grin.

"I knew his mother, you know," he said and had the pleasure of seeing Mikhail's questioning eyes open, to look straight at him with wide curiosity. "Feilong looks just like her, the whoring, treacherous bitch."

Mikhail flinched at his words and his eyes narrowed, but he did not dare to protest his tone, lest he stop speaking completely and Yuri basked in this last shred of power he had over him, over his insatiable need to know; always to know more about the object of his obsessions.

"She certainly was a sight to behold," Yuri continued in malicious satisfaction. "No man could be unaffected by her beauty. When she passed, everyone stared, but that is no wonder. I've heard stories that she came from an eight-hundred-year-long line of high-class concubines that served emperors and generals, of women bred into sexual servitude for their looks, skills and erotic appeal. She had centuries of tradition and allure running in her veins."

Mikhail stared, helpless and intrigued as Yuri got to his feet and eyed him with wicked, glinting eyes.

"Liu was so infatuated with her, he worshipped the ground she walked on," Yuri went on, walking over to look out through the window. "He owned her, body and soul, but a caged bird will always long for freedom and Tou offered it to her, in return for certain… services. He was a powerful man, even then, at the beginning of his rise to power. She thought that he would clear her unclean name. She thought that he would marry her. That they would live happily ever after. The fool that she was, she believed his every word; believed that he loved her and that he was the man of her dreams. Her saviour."

"What happened?" Mikhail asked in fascination and Yuri cocked his head towards him.

"You know what happened," Yuri answered. "She was nowhere nearly smart enough to pull of the treason Tou was asking of her and bring about the downfall of Liu. She got pregnant with the wrong man and Liu found out everything. She ran to Tou for protection, thinking that he would welcome her with open arms for the blessing she thought she was bringing him and had all her sweet, sugar-coated dreams fall apart around her.

"Of course, he never loved her. Of course, he was just using her. He beat her to a bloody pulp for not being careful, for allowing herself to conceive, but most of all for admitting everything to Liu and for revealing his name. All his careful planning to take over the Hong Kong underworld was spoiled and all she had to show as compensation was a bastard child. As if he would ever recognize a son of a whore as his own. As if he would ever want his blood mixed with her blood. As if he would ever accept someone so dirty and low as the mother of his children. He was a respected man, for god's sake, happily married, a politician at the start of his career and he would not have his name blemished by her shame.

"She gave birth in the most miserable of circumstances; hunted, wretched and abandoned. By the time Liu found her again, she was barely a shadow of her former self. I heard stories that he killed her like an animal right in front of her son, but that he could not bring himself to kill the child too, because he was so beautiful. Because he had her eyes and looked so much like her.

"You see, even though she had betrayed him and spat on everything he had given her, he loved her. Though she had scorned all the riches he had lavished her with, only to bear the son of his worst enemy, he loved her. Even though he killed her, he still loved her. That was how powerful the sway of her beauty was over him. That was why he took her son in as his own. That was why Feilong lived, even though he should have been put down like an unwanted cub even then!"

"That's an ugly way to put it," Mikhail said, visibly shaken by the tale.

"For God's sake, open your eyes, Mikhail!" Yuri said harshly. "This is what you are risking so much for! Lies, treason and deceit! Liu Feilong was spawned by the deepest of hell and he will never leave it! It is not his destiny to rise above the misery that both birthed and fathered him!"

A sudden, urgent knock on the door made both of them turn. The man outside did not wait for permission to enter and stuck his shaggy, blond head inside.

"What?" Mikhail asked, as if awoken from a dream.

"Sir, the transfer is complete," he answered. "At any moment now, they will call with the location."

Mikhail took a deep breath, and looked around. The sun was rising, the clouds where waning and finally, the accursed phone rang with the information he so desperately needed to know.