I'm so glad I finally got over the writer's block for this one. Enjoy! Trigger warnings: sexual assault, violence

Yato was lucky. Found out, bound to a pipe, bleeding, but still lucky. There had been a chance that finding out about the money would backfire, that Fujisaki and Nora wouldn't be stupid enough to take him directly to Father for punishment, but here he was tied to some piping in the compound that he hadn't been to since somewhere around elementary age. Since life is nothing but circular, Yato was back at the spot where it had all begun, where Sakura had died and he had become a murderer. He tried not to remember if this was the room, the very place that he'd watched her mind deteriorate.

That was the point though, wasn't it? The last little bit of mental torture before seeing Father was a must. The longer he spent there the clearer her image became. It was as if a film was playing in his head, starting from the first time they met, back when her brown eyes were so bright and wide, her hair back with strands decorated with beads. She was beautiful, not just for her looks but for the way that she exuded life and seemed to embody only its pleasures.

Maybe that's why he had been drawn to her, a childhood usually saturated in blood and viscera in want of warmth. His own mother was nothing more than a blackened face behind a veil, the memory that only consisted of pocked skin and death, so when Sakura had appeared it was as if he had been gifted some kind of normalcy. God knows all he wanted was some kind of normalcy. She had taught him there was some corner of his heart that was still capable of love, that not all of it was tarred by violence.

The irony that she was the first he'd ever killed hadn't escaped him, and as he tilted his head against the pipe, feeling the coolness of the water enclosed within, he watched that very moment play over in his mind. Father had made him wait outside but he'd watched the men come and go for hours, the sounds of her cries diminishing in strength as the hours went by. As the sun set, Father had sent him in, let him study her. The beads had been ripped from her hair just as the clothes that covered her body had been torn to shreds. There was no more shine to her eyes, suddenly now reminding him more of the dead, dry earth than sweet chocolate.

Remember that anything you love can be taken from you. It's better to not love at all. It's safer.

To drill that home it was the same each day for a week: the waiting, the studying, the ruin glazing over her eyes. He remembered clearly the last day, the one his body had the nerve to produce tears for when she grasped his wrist and pulled him close and begged him for an end to it all. In his teens, in moments of anger, he wondered if it was fair to ask that of a child, but he knew the truth. He'd never been a child, he'd just burst forth from calamity, not born of woman but of chaos. The next day he brought the penknife. He plunged it into her neck. He told himself that the corner of his heart that loved was dead.

Now she was there, sitting across from him, her face blurring every so often with Hiyori. In a delirious moment, he wondered if he'd done the same to Hiyori if that was really what he was remembering when he saw the vicious red mess across his hands. Maybe he hadn't done all this to save her but instead was just what he'd always feared: the bringer of her demise. It was there, settled against that pipe, that he let the surety creep in that he would never see her again because it had to be the reality that one of them was dead or would be soon enough.

Yukine was correct, Ebisu did owe Yato, but the full extent of that was never something either of them had talked about. It was Ebisu's last memory, the one that often played back in his head when lying awake at night, feeling all the thoughts and moments from the day drifting away from him and into oblivion. He would never remember anything new, but he would always remember Yato.

Stacked in the pile of memories that weren't, Ebisu would have found many of Yukine. He hadn't been there for the actual discovery of the boy, but Yato had told him all the grotesque details later, most of them at least permanently cast in Kunimi's mind. Yato had not expected to become part of any of this, simply asked to complete a clean-up job, a mundane term for such vulgar work. And, most importantly, this was when Yato was still barely himself, still washing away the residue of Yaboku.

He had described how the stench of blood was apparently even without opening the trunk of the car that had been left in a vacant lot. There had been a million other smells, too, but blood was always the first one that came to Yato's mind. The trunk had been finicky, requiring fingers jammed in the mechanism to pop open completely as if it knew what it was hiding. As the trunk first opened, Yato was busy nursing a cut-up knuckle which was what saved him from throwing up on Yukine himself.

The strength of the smell quadrupled as the trunk opened and for all the misery and woe Yato had been used to, even this was overwhelming. The bile leaped from his throat and out of his mouth, staining the pavement just before the bumper. It seemed impossible then that Yato would have to do much cleaning because as he looked at the lump that was supposed to be a boy in the trunk he was sure that the thing was already nothing more than decaying flesh. In reply to that thought, Yukine had given a gurgling breath.

That was when the anonymous call came to the EMS, the trunk left open to draw attention. Yato made easy claims that he had gotten there after the police and that the clean-up would have to wait for the hospital. He didn't visit for the first few days, but every night when he went to sleep he'd see the grooves in the trunk lid where Yukine had lost fingernails digging for some kind of hold. He tried to temper it with thoughts of the consequences of him trying to have someone, anyone, of Sakura and what that had done, but none of it seemed to matter.

The fifth day he'd gone to the hospital. Yukine would remember the Yaboku look, the cold-blooded killer that was there to murder him, but by the time Yato had walked through the door of the tiny hospital room, he'd already made his decision. He'd never let Yukine be locked in the dark again.

So it was Ebisu who had arranged for Yukine to be lost in the hospital system.

It was Ebisu who made the fake papers of guardianship.

It was Ebisu that arranged for all the payments for the hospitals and surgeries until Yukine began to look something like Yukine again.

All of this should have been enough to return the favor, in a way a life for a life. Besides the story of the bloody trunk, Ebisu never remembered any of these things. Yato had asked for a million tiny favors as well, most of them voided from Ebisu's memory and none kept in the vault that was his son's mind. Those little things didn't matter, didn't amount to the absurd debt that had to be paid at some point and that was why he'd let that little blond boy come to the safe house, let him offer his life for Yato's if that was even possible.

Ebisu didn't even bother with conversation, though Yukine wasn't exactly full of even an ounce of bravery he'd had over the phone, especially with Kunimi breathing down his neck in the tiny office. The only thing Yukine could do was watch as Ebisu made phone calls, his words sometimes not making sense as if code were appropriate in these kinds of transactions. Yukine had sat there sweating for an hour before Ebisu finally folded his hands, nodding at Kunimi.

"What we do tonight purges Waka's debt," Kunimi's words snapped at Yukine's ears, his tone cutting. "You'll tell Yato that when you see him."

"Of course," Yukine could only blink up at the giant man. "But… what are you going to do?"

"It's better you don't know," Ebisu stated matter-of-factly as he opened one of his side drawers. "You'll need this." He slid the gun across the table, taking care to aim the muzzle to the wall.

Yukine felt his stomach drop to his shoes, the bile rising up in his throat, "I can't."

There was no sigh, no quiver of fatherly love as he looked at the boy, just cold calculation of whether or not any of this would come to fruition. "Yato will not protect you."

After the trunk, Yukine had always told himself that the old part of him had died, that whatever was there before was gone. Suddenly, he was all too aware of the parallel, the way that Yato wanted that side of him dead, too. With slick palms, he stretched out his hand across the table. "Give me a knife. I'm better with a knife."

The room was silent except for the thunder of his own heart in his ears and the ticking of that stupid metronome on Father's desk. It was meant to unnerve, to leave you unsettled in the face of a man that had so many faces. It didn't help that Yato was probably edging closely to dehydration, those unsettling memories like a fever over his brain. Even looking at the metronome, the desk, he wondered if all of this was another memory. It didn't help when the chair swiveled the young face was there, a face that just barely looked like his.

Fujisaki pushed him against the desk, one hand coming to the base of his neck, grasping mostly into his scarf. "Our son has returned but he's been unfaithful."

Yato's eyes darted around, placing Nora by the door, her back pressed against the wall in an effort to look uninterested but he could see the way her fingers dug into her sleeves, nervously tearing at the fabric.

"Poor, misguided, Yaboku," the voice from chair purred. Even looking at Father straight on made him unsure of what he was seeing, a young man, an old man, alive, dead, maybe nothing more than a dirty memory Yato had been trying to keep at bay.

Fujisaki picked up where Father stopped, his voice cooing in Yato's ear, "You think the outside world is for you, the comforts of humanity, the touch of another. But you were made for ruin. Made to kill. I didn't really want to, but you're forcing our hands, Yaboku. We've brought that Iki girl here, and you'll learn Sakura's lesson all over again."

Yato swallowed the 'no' that wanted to groan from his lips, not wanting to give in to the very real possibility that it wasn't a lie. Instead, he clutched at the desk, one hand planting on the metronome and feeling it snap beneath his fingers. "I always hated that thing," he muttered as his fingers flexed into the metal.

"Maybe if you apologize-" Fujisaki's words were cut off by the scarf starting to unravel in his hands.

Yato planted a knee on the desk, propelling himself with whatever was left of his consciousness forward, the snapped pendulum tensed in his fist. Everything about this would have to be perfect, and Yato mused that it must be Fujisaki's fault for reminding him that he was always best at the kill. The metal should have snapped again, bent in his hand but instead, it slid through the thin skin of Father's neck, plunging into the artery. The smell of blood hit him before the color, Yato's mind still playing tricks on him, seeing horrible face after face cringing in terror.

He had just enough time to yank it out and stab again, giving it a decent tug in an effort to rip and tear before he felt the sharp metal slide into his own side, the hissing Fujisaki back at his ear. "You stupid bastard."

Yato waited for him to withdraw the blade before falling to his back on the desk, his feet kicking out and planting in Fujisaki's chest. His eyes darted to Nora but she was frozen, eyes wide with fear, but he didn't have another moment to waste trying to assess whether she was the next knife coming for him. Instead, he threw himself forward, falling on Fujisaki as he struggled to gain his breath, jamming the wrist with the knife to the floor. Yato sat on his waist, pinning the other arms as he tried to formulate other options as he felt the warmth draining from his side.

I have to kill them. I have no choice. If Hiyori is here, they have to die and I have to do it, but even with all the will in his mind behind the words, his body was starting to fail him. Yato tried to move his hand to Fujisaki's neck, hoping with the last of his strength he could crush his throat, but he felt Nora's hands plant against his shoulder, tossing him over to the side.

The tables turned as Fujisaki loomed over him, the knife hovering over Yato's face. "You stupid, stupid bastard! You've ruined it! Ruined everything and I should just kill you now like the worm you are!" The saliva spat from his lips, the knife still poised as he screamed. But the popping interrupted his fury, confusion suddenly paling Fujisaki's face. "Nora, go see what that is."

Yato watched as she disappeared through the doorway, the open door giving way to a steadier sound, like a popcorn bag in the microwave. That gave way to a beautiful moment of delirium, the memories of being with her on the couch, the way she'd steal always eat the first half of the bowl… but her, he was forgetting about her. He snapped himself out the warmth, his hand shooting up to discharge the knife from Fujisaki's.

Fujisaki's hands clamped at his wrists, driving them to the floor. "Stop fighting! You're nothing, nothing without us!"

Yukine made sure to plunge the knife in deep, right at the base of the neck, even without knowing the irony in his motions, to punctuate Fujisaki's screams. His exclamations ended in a sick gurgling, his eyes wide with terror in Yato's face. Yukine withdrew the knife only to dig it in again and again until his hand was so slick with blood he could no longer keep his grip. His breath came out in short gasps even as he kicked Fujisaki's body aside, revealing Yato struggling with the reality of the moment.

I have to be dead, he repeated over and over in his mind. It wasn't until he reached out a shaky hand, clasping into the cloth of Yukine's pant leg, finding substance there, that he allowed his mind to start to believe it was real. "Yukine?"

At the sound of his name, he snapped back to life. "Can you get up?"

"Maybe." Yato rolled onto his side that wasn't streaming blood, trying to tell his legs they had to work. He got to his knees before the wave of gray started to hit him. "Hiyori's here. They have her."

"No, she's at home." Relief washed over Yato twice at the words and Yukine jamming himself under Yato's arm, bringing him back to unsteady feet. "You have to help if I'm going to get you out of here."

"Trying," Yato groaned, fighting back the fuzzy edges that were threatening to take his vision. "We have to go now."

"As if I didn't know that," Yukine hissed. The two stumbled forward into the dark hallway, the gunfire now more intermittent but the rooms and walkways void of people.

"Nora, did you see Nora?" Yato muttered out.

Yukine didn't bother with an answer other than to shush him, worried that no one around could easily turn to anyone that was left with enough noise being made. It was started to become more of a drag, Yato's head lolling from side to side with each move forward and the desperation was beginning to turn Yukine's courage threadbare. They had finally reached the outside of the building, crashing out a side door into what seemed to be a small alleyway, when Yato began to slip more than Yukine could bear.

It was then that he felt the cool metal touch his neck, the acrid smell of gunpowder freezing his breath. Yukine braced for a shot but when he felt nothing turned his head, coming face to face with cold, violet eyes. "Veena," he murmured.

"Is he alive?" It wasn't the hopeful way a friend should ask, instead a calculation there that chilled Yukine more than her eyes just had.

"Barely," Yukine breathed.

Veena paused only long enough to look over the wiry boy bathed in blood. "Let's go." She moved past him, hoisting Yato over her shoulder and starting back down the alleyway into the darkness.