Yohji pulled the collar of his jacket up around his ears to shield them from the wind as he stepped off the motorboat they used to commute back and forth between the yacht and the city. It had been cold on the boat, which he had attributed to being on the water, but, now that he was on dry land again, he wasn't finding it to be much warmer. He shivered and stuffed his hands into his pockets as he walked off the pier, waving his thanks to the man who tied up the motorboat for him.
"Shit," Yohji muttered under his breath, as he made his way from the harbor to the stop for the bus that would take him to the district where the Koneko was located. "I know it's winter and everything, but, does it really have to be this fucking cold?" As he approached the bus stop, big, fat flakes of snow started falling. "Terrific. A walk in the snow. Just what I fucking need," he muttered, as he pulled off his sunglasses and attempted to brush a few errant flakes off of them, to no avail. He finally gave up, and replaced them on his face just as the bus arrived.
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Yohji sat in a coffee shop about ten blocks away from the Koneko, slowly sipping a cup of coffee and, occasionally, checking his watch. On his way there, he had stopped off at a convenience store to purchase two pre-loaded cell phones, which were, currently, resting on the table top in front of him. He knew he was taking a huge chance --- with Aya's life, as well as his own --- but, he had to contact Omi and Ken. The four of them had been together for too long, and had been through too much for him to leave them with no word and no reassurance. They were family, and you just didn't treat family like that. Still, he knew Kritiker was looking for Aya, and, now, probably for him, too, considering he'd gone rogue to help the redhead. So, he had to be extremely careful in his planning, or what he intended as a supportive gesture of friendship could end up getting Ken and Omi killed, too. Yohji didn't think he could take that. He didn't care much about his own life, but he hated the fact that he had yet to figure out a way of getting Aya out of this mess alive. He had come up with innumerable plans during the past two weeks, only to discard each one, when the trail of logic had, inevitably, led him to the redhead's death. Knowing he had doomed Omi and Ken, too, would just be too much to bear.
So, he had been planning. For the past week, he had left the yacht at different times during the day to disappear into the city for hours on end. He wasn't wild about leaving Aya alone with Hank. Although he had let go of the fear that Hank was a member of Schwarz, he still hadn't completely forgiven the man for Aya's current predicament; after all, Hank had betrayed the redhead to Schuldich, which was the catalyst that had started this whole snowball rolling downhill toward Hell. Still, he did think Hank was sorry for what he'd done, and the Texan had been struggling to make amends. Besides, it couldn't be helped. It was bad enough Aya and he had left without a word to the rest of the team; he wasn't going to let Omi and Ken wallow in fear and worry over what might have happened to them. But, contacting them required a lot of planning, which meant hours of surveillance.
And, that's exactly what Yohji had been doing during all those trips to town --- watching. Each time, he had picked a strategically located spot near the shop --- sometimes a partially-hidden alley across the street, sometimes a vacant building overlooking the shop, sometimes a bus stop bench, but never the same place twice --- and simply watched the daily activity for hours, trying to pick up on any patterns that might make it easier for him to contact the remaining two Weiss members without being discovered by Kritiker. It was risky, coming so close to the Koneko, but he was good at blending into the crowd and going unnoticed; you don't survive very long as an assassin if you stick out too much.
He had figured Kritiker would place agents with Omi and Ken almost immediately upon learning of his and Aya's disappearance, and he had figured Kritiker would probably find out they were gone without having to be told by the two youngest team members. From what Aya had told him, he had taken out the two Kritiker agents assigned to "retire" him, and Yohji figured, once the organization found those two guys, the flower shop would be their first stop. His first surveillance trip had told him his hunches were, as always, dead-on accurate. He had seen two new guys working the shop with Omi and Ken. From the tense way the two youngest Weiss members behaved around the new arrivals, and from the inept manner in which the new guys interacted with the shop's normal retail crowd, Yohji had guessed that, while they were definitely Kritiker agents, the new arrivals weren't operatives, which meant Kritiker had placed the men there to spy on Omi and Ken, in the hopes that the two of them would slip up, and, somehow, lead them to the missing part of the team. Yohji had come to that conclusion with mixed emotions. On the one hand, he was angry with Kritiker, not only because they were trying to kill Aya, but also because of the strain and stress under which they were placing Omi and Ken, who were both completely innocent in this whole mess. Yet, on the other hand, the agents' placement at the shop told him Kritiker had no leads on Aya's location, a fact that made Yohji undeniably relieved and happy.
After watching and recording the daily activity around the shop for the past week, Yohji had managed to figure out the small hole in the net Kritiker had thrown around Ken and Omi a small flaw that would make it possible for him to contact the youngest Weiss members without being detected. At first, the Kritiker agents hadn't left either of the remaining assassins alone at all during the day. Each time he had seen either Omi or Ken leave for deliveries or on some other errand, they had been accompanied by one, or the other, agent, and there hadn't been a time when the remaining part of Weiss were alone in the shop. But, it seemed that two weeks with no leads as to the whereabouts of the A.W.O.L. team members had made the agents rather sloppy in their work; probably, Kritiker had concluded their two missing assassins had fled the city, and, maybe even the country, by now. Within the past few days, Yohji had noticed that the Kritiker agents had started leaving at the same time every day to report in to Persia, and they had started leaving together, which meant that, for almost an hour, Omi and Ken were alone in the shop, left to their own devices.
"You want a refill, hon?" the waitress' smoky-hoarse voice cut into Yohji's thoughts, jarring him painfully back to the present.
He looked briefly up at the waitress, who was watching him expectantly, coffee pot tilted just above the rim of his cup, and then checked his watch. It read 3:30 PM, almost time for the Kritiker agents to leave. He looked back at the woman, who was still watching him, and smiled as he realized, for the first time, that he had yet to answer her.
"No. No, thanks," he said, giving her another Kudou, lady-killer smile. "Just the check, please."
She frowned at him, seemingly oblivious to his charm, which had always been so deadly to members of the opposite sex, and, with a roll of her eyes and an irritated sigh, pulled the check from her apron pocket and tossed it onto the table before turning on her heel to stalk back to the cash register. Perhaps, considering all he'd been through during the past few weeks, he was losing his powers over women. Yohji considered this for a moment, and then shrugged the thought off entirely, chuckling to himself. No, that was absurd. She was probably just in a bad mood because she'd been on her feet all day, and he, cheap bastard that he was, had only ordered coffee, which meant she was getting a lousy tip. Yohji shrugged. There were some things that even his charm couldn't fix.
After the waitress departed, Yohji surveyed the two pre-paid phones for a moment. One of them was blue, and the other, red. He didn't know what had possessed him to purchase such brightly-colored ones. It did seem a bit odd, considering he was supposed to be so secretive, and everything, and a bright color was the easiest way for something to get noticed. Possibly, it was because his whole world lately seemed filled with so much gray, due to the absolute and utter hopelessness and helplessness he felt about Aya's situation. He didn't really know, and he didn't have time to analyze it now; he silently told himself it had seemed like a good idea at the time, and let it drop at that.
He reached out and grabbed one of the phones at random --- the red one. Flipping it over, he pulled a flower shop business card out of his pocket and copied the phone's number onto its back. Below it, he wrote: "Don't call from shop. Go to park down the street." Sighing, Yohji stuffed the blue phone and the business card into the small, cardboard box that was also sitting on the table. He sealed the box, wrote the flower shop's address on its top, and then rose, draining the last of the coffee from his cup as he stood. He flipped over the check, and, seeing that it totaled out to $1.50, he dug $21.50 from his pocket and left it on the table as he walked from the shop without so much as a backward glance to acknowledge the forcedly cheerful "Have a nice day" the waitress called out at his retreating back. Once on the street, he shoved the red cell in his pocket, hitched his collar up against the wind and snow, and quickly walked the ten blocks that would put him in front of the shop.
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Yohji paused in the dark, partially-hidden alleyway across from the flower shop. With a pang of feeling maybe regret, maybe sadness he wasn't quite sure which he watched as Omi and Ken worked outside the store, getting ready for the end of the business day. Ken pulled down the awning that shaded the store's front window, dumping snow on Omi's head in the process, and Yohji smiled at the boy's shrill cry of irritation. Ken just laughed, which prompted Omi to chase after the ex-goalie, who nimbly evaded him by ducking in and around the few winter-hardy pot plants that decorated the sidewalk in front of the store. Finally, all rough horseplay aside, Omi moved to begin taking the plants in for the evening. Yohji couldn't hold back a wistful smile as he watched the kid attempt to lift a plant that was almost as big as he was. Omi teetered backward, coming perilously close to crashing through the newly-repaired front window, and Ken, seeing his friend's plight, dashed over to help. Yohji couldn't hear the words being spoken, but he could tell, by the tilt of Ken's head and Omi's down-cast eyes, that the ex-goalie was severely scolding the youngest Weiss member for his carelessness. Yohji thought about what would happen next: after gathering all the plants inside, they would probably go in for the evening, retreating up to the apartment above the shop for dinner, and, afterward, Ken would, most likely, plop down in front of the TV with a huge bowl of popcorn to whoop and holler at a televised soccer game, while Omi would probably spend the rest of the evening working on his computer. If Aya and he had been there, he knew the redhead would help Omi with dinner, eat in silence, and then retreat to his room, or, on rare occasions, to the living room, to read. Even though Aya was usually fairly quiet and uncommunicative around them, none of them really minded. They had all grown comfortable with the redhead's habits during their time together, and his silent presence was comforting and familiar. As for himself, Yohji smiled as he pictured how he would have, of course, refused to help with dinner at all, and stayed in the living room, in front of the TV, constantly complaining about how hungry he was and asking when dinner would be ready, until Aya finally broke his silence long enough to tell him to shut the hell up.
The tall blonde was surprised to feel tears sliding over his cheeks. He hadn't realized he was crying, and the emotion he felt at watching this familiar, night-time scene surprised him. He hadn't ever admitted it to anyone else, but closing time had always been his favorite part of the day. Even on evenings when he went out, which, before all this mess with Aya, had been most every evening, he had always made it a point to stay home long enough to eat dinner with his little adopted family, reveling in the quiet that descended over the shop and apartment at the end of the day, and, possibly, if he could admit it to himself, deluding himself into thinking they were actually "normal", "ordinary" guys. If the truth was known, the rest of the team probably felt the same way. Now, though, standing across the street and watching the achingly familiar scene as an outsider just reminded him of how much he had lost, and, if Aya died, how much more they all stood to lose in the near future. Yohji felt his throat tighten and his heart clench in his chest at the thought, and he irritably wiped his gloved hands roughly across his face to displace the unwanted tears.
When the two Kritiker agents emerged from the shop and walked away, without so much as a backward glance at Omi and Ken, Yohji looked down at his watch. "Right on time," he whispered as he saw that the time read 4:00 pm.
A little boy, one that Yohji vaguely recognized as one of Ken's soccer kids, walked by at that opportune moment. Yohji reached out, lightening-quick, to grab the kid's arm and yank him back into the alley. He immediately cupped his hand over the boy's mouth to stifle his outcry of surprise. The last thing he needed was for the damn kid to alert Ken, Omi, or, even worse, the two departing Kritiker flunkies, to his presence, which would, of course, completely ruin all the hours of planning he'd done.
"Hey, kid," he said, leaning down to look the frightened boy in the face. He still held one hand cupped over the kid's mouth, but he smiled at the boy over the rims of his sun glasses, and asked, "You're one of Ken's soccer kids, right?" The boy stared at him with wide, frightened, blue-violet eyes that uncomfortably reminded Yohji of Aya, but the kid stopped trying to struggle away and nodded. At that response, Yohji continued, "You remember me? I used to work with Ken in the flower shop over there?" The boy squinted as he strained to get a closer look at Yohji in the alley's quickly-deepening darkness, but, finally, he nodded. "If I take my hand away, you're not gonna scream, right?" The boy shook his head in response, and Yohji removed his hand. He looked down at his glove and frowned when he realized the kid had slobbered all over it. Still frowning, Yohji wiped the palm of his hand against his pant leg, at the same time reaching around with his other hand to dig his wallet out of his back pocket. "Listen," he told the kid, "I need a favor. I need you to take this package," he held the box out to the boy, "over to Ken, and tell him a deliveryman asked you to drop it off. I'll give you $10 if you do it."
"OK," the boy replied.
He took the offered money, tucked the box under his arm, and, after a quick check of traffic, darted across the street to where Ken and Omi stood on the sidewalk in front of the store. Yohji watched as the kid handed the box to Ken, who stared at it briefly before tearing it open roughly, with shaking hands. The tall blonde shrank further into the alley's shadows as Ken removed the blue cell phone and business card from the box, calling Omi over in the process, and the two of them stared across the street, as if trying to see into the alley's darkness. Yohji knew they couldn't see him, but he also knew they were aware he was there, all the same. He tarried long enough to watch Ken and Omi both retreat into the store and re-emerge onto the sidewalk within seconds. As his teammates hurried away from the Koneko, Yohji stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat and walked in the opposite direction, toward the other end of the alley, which would put him on a street only three blocks from the park.
