A/N: I was daydreaming in English when a vision of a block of flats came to me. One of Anria's fics made me realise it was a perfect setting for a YoSchu. Well, I couldn't see any of the other characters being willing to live in such squalid settings.
This is set between the DP CDs and Gluhen, with the character designs 'evolving' somewhere in the middle. I mostly ignore the Schwarz drama CD, though you could use it to account for the missing members (Farf would be married, and Nagi with Kritiker) though it can't explain what Brad says. Basically, when I wrote this, I didn't know what was in the Schwarz Drama CD. Which is ironic, because I now know more that those CDs than the Weiss ones.
This fic is 29,551 words long. That's about sixty pages on MS Word. So, yes, frighteningly long. I've had to split it up because it takes too long to upload otherwise. The chunks are rather uneven. You'll notice a few 'next's and 'previous's scattered throughout - basically, rather than re-edit the whole thing I took the appropriate edited chapters off my website, since I've gone through the whole thing since I last posted it here, breaking it down into more manageable chunks and sorting out a few bits.
Disclaimers: Yohji and Schu belong to the person who owns them. Who, alas, is not me. Ditto the cameo characters.
Warnings: yaoi, ridiculous length, angst, sap&fluff (I know, I know, they don't belong in a YoSchu), lime… This version is rated R, but an NC17 version can be found on my website (just look under my userinfo).
Thanks goes to: Anria, Alz-chan and Kami-chan, for Beta reading various versions and offering much needed advice!
"Blah" = speech.
'Blah' = thought / telepathy. No distinction, for reasons that, hopefully, will become clear.
It was a tall block of flats. They didn't even rate the word apartments. They were bedsits with a 'bathroom'. Cheap and nasty and cloned the world over. Whatever country you were in, whichever city, there'd be a block of flats like this, right down to the graffiti on the windowless wall of the ninth floor.
The concrete living quarters had their own distinct aroma common to all buildings of this type. It was overpowering. Over cooked meals consisting primarily of leftovers, stews and hotpots and those miscellaneous dishes with names like Bubble and Squeak, which tell you nothing about what's in them, and an overtone of cabbage permeated every wall of the place. While these smells were unpleasant, on top of them were worse: vomit and urine and stale beer and cheap takeaways. Concrete and cinder block walls with too few windows made the whole place feel as cheap as it was.
In a few places some enterprising landlord had painted the apartment doors, but had unfortunately chosen what was no doubt enticingly named chocolate brown, but was more accurately a shit brown. One or two walls had been whitewashed, but it was faded. The lumps of damp plaster it had been meant to cover had been ousted from the wall by the mildew and crumbled in sad piles on the cement stairs.
There were twelve stories of misery on this particular building, and Yohji Kudoh lived right at the top. It was cheaper at the top. Neither lift worked, one stuck at ground floor and the other between floors four and five. The change in the stench as he passed between the two floors leant some credence to the urban legend that the unfortunate people who'd been in the lift when it had stuck over a decade ago were still there.
Yohji knew these stairs by heart; he'd walked them so many times. He had read every piece of graffiti whilst waiting for other tenants to pass on the narrow staircase. On the sixth floor was the ambiguous message 'Teni lost count here'. Assuming the message referred to the number of steps, Yohji felt a degree of respect for the author of the note. He'd given up before he'd reached the third floor.
His legs aching, his lungs heaving, his heart beating like a drum, Yohji finally reached the twelfth floor. He glanced around at the other six apartments on his level. Two had eviction notices pinned to the doors, one yellowing with months of neglect, the other new that day. On a third door was a square of brighter paint where an eviction notice had recently been removed. Interesting, a new neighbour. Yohji walked past it and shoved his key into the next door. After a few tries it fit, and the hinges groaned as he forced the chipboard portal inwards with one bruised shoulder.
The room was small, even by Japanese standards. There was a single futon, barely wide enough even for Yohji, who'd gone from merely lanky to rather emaciated recently, an oven that only worked one out of every three attempts, a fridge that kept food at room temperature, a table with one leg a foot shorter than the others, a chair with a rotting back and a tiny bathroom, with the toilet and sink actually in the shower. Yohji kicked at the futon and a rat scurried out. Groaning, he dropped into one of the chairs. There was a crack, and he was sitting on the floor surrounded by firewood. He didn't bother to get up.
There was a wail from next door, announcing the arrival of single teenaged mother Hiroko and her son Hiiro. The toddler was screaming and throwing a tantrum, and the girl was screaming and throwing a tantrum, and Yohji was surprised at his own capacity for tuning it all out. He flopped backward onto the futon, and lit a cigarette. The blue-grey smoke laced its way around the broken ceiling fan and curled across the ceiling to gather in the corners. Yohji coughed; a harsh, barking smoker's cough.
There was a sudden bang on the other side, almost enough to make Yohji interested, but his apathy overtook him before he could gather the effort to getup and find out what was going on with the new tenant and he lay still, wondering vaguely if and when it would happen again.
There was a loud knocking, and Yohji realised his new neighbour was going to join in the screaming with Hiroko and Hiiro. Baka. Fool. Idiot. He was going to be ripped to shreds by the petite fifteen year old. Of course, no guarantee it was a he.
A fight did ensue, and Yohji frowned. It was muffled, but the newcomer was definitely male. Something about that voice, perhaps a bit nasal? It was hard to tell through the plasterboard walls. There was the sound of doors slamming, and Yohji heard his new neighbour muttering to himself in his own room. Some loud music slammed through the wall, and Yohji found himself treated to a barrage of German he didn't understand and, all things considered, probably didn't want to. Now the neighbour was singing along his voice was clearer.
He tried to shake off the uneasy feeling. There were a lot of German people in Japan . Hundreds, maybe even thousands. And that building had collapsed into the sea. Sure, Weiss had got out alive… Nah, it almost certainly wasn't that carrot topped Nazi from Schwarz.
The stereo sailed gracefully through one wall and slammed into the other, just above Yohji's head. He stared at the dent.
"-zi and it's red!" a voice bellowed.
"My wall!" Hiroko wailed from the other side.
This was enough to make Yohji sit up, and he stared straight into the next-door apartment. The stereo, now shattered on the futon, had left a fair sized hole in the cheap wall, and he could see the orange haired, German inhabitant of the neighbouring flat. The walls were two layers of plasterboard, some with insulation between, some with brick, and some, up here where there was no need to support anything but the roof, were as empty as the minds that lived between them.
"It's not orange!" Schuldig yelled. "Red! Red!"
"Kudoh Yohji, what the fuck do you think you're doing?" Hiroko screamed. Yohji gave up staring through the wall and moved to open the door. He didn't have to, as Hiroko's incessant pounding snapped the rusted hinges and it crashed onto Yohji's legs. He yelped.
Hiroko stared at him, aghast, and then spotted the hole in the wall. "Sorry," she muttered and strode next door. She hadn't even knocked when Schuldig flung open the door.
"Was?" he growled in German, his voice dangerously low.
"Are you going to pay for what you did to both Kudoh-kun's and my walls?" Hiroko demanded. "Do you have any idea what we'll be charged if the landlord sees the damage you-" her body sailed in a graceful arc to slam into the door opposite. Fortunately it was one of the untenanted flats. She whimpered.
Yohji shoved the door off of his legs and leaped to his feet. Adrenaline began to flood his system, and for the first time in months he felt truly alive. That was Schuldig. Schuldig was Schwarz. He was bad. He'd just hit Hiroko (Yohji conveniently overlooked the number of times he'd wanted to do the same himself, but had lacked the courage). Snatching his watch from its honoured place around one of the gas rings on the cooker, he marched purposefully towards Schuldig's flat.
God, it felt good to have a purpose again. No more languishing in a shoddy apartment, waiting for a call that could never come, as he didn't even have a phone. When he'd first come out of the hospital, he'd been confident Kritiker would contact him in a matter of days. He'd found a nice three-room apartment, and had been there a month when the landlord told him his credit was maxed out. He was no longer receiving a regular allowance from Kritiker. The news stunned Yohji.
Still, he'd been expectant. Surely, they'd come for him. What else could happen? He was legally dead. He was a useful member of a field team. His skills were invaluable. He didn't have anywhere else to go. He'd found a much cheaper apartment and ended up working in a supermarket to cover costs. Unfortunately, the credit company decided they wanted repaying, and within another month the apartment was gone, and all the furniture Yohji had painstakingly saved for.
This had gone on, for another three apartments, before Yohji ended up here. No real furniture, no phone, no TV or computer or stereo (although he planned to see if he could fix Schuldig's) or clock or cupboards or anything. Running water was sporadic. Electricity was optional, it seemed. The oven was just another place to store dented cans of past their sell-by-date beans and rice and other cheap food he got at a discount. He was still working at the supermarket, but his debts were swallowing more money than he could earn. The interest per month was more than he earned, and they kept on building.
But if he took out Schuldig? Surely Kritiker would take him back then. If he took out Schwarz's telepath, one of the most dangerous men of the face of the earth? Surely…
Schuldig was leaning in the doorway. He hadn't shaved for almost a week, his clothes were worn through and filthy and his hair was matted. Yohji unconsciously checked his own, lank and greasy and in desperate need of a cut. Schuldig's cough was an echo of Yohji's, and his skin was sallow and dry.
And then Yohji looked him in the eye, trying to regain his faltering confidence, searching for some of that maliciousness he used to know. It was a mistake. Pain and hunger shone in those eyes, and the desperate battle against madness. Schuldig was in a worse state than he was.
Yohji couldn't face it. He turned away, and helped Hiroko up. She was trembling, and young Hiiro was crying for her. Yohji gave her a hand up and a companionable pat on the shoulder, and she retreated to her own flat. Yohji glanced back at Schuldig, who was still slouched against the doorframe, and returned to his own apartment.
At some point, he meant to put the fridge over that hole, but as the adrenaline wore off and the day's little aches and pains overtook him, he collapsed onto the futon.
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