The Red Candle
By Nix Winter
Disclaimer: I don't own WK
Youji purred into the comlink, so confident that he could have melted chilled honey. "I'm just going back to check on him. He's just being too anal."
Nothing about this mission had been perfect, more like well timed near disaster. The mission had been to take out a yakuza who was dealing in weapon technology. Said yakuza seemed to have had a friend somewhere, as he knew they were coming. He was still dead, and about thirty of his gangbangers with him. Youji leaned against a wall, let out a bit more of his wire, and felt glad that blood didn't show so well on black. He was tired of blood. Tired of evil. Tired enough to want to make a mistake, except, except he had yet to get Aya to smile at him, and when he thought of those violet eyes, he found he still longed for something.
Love was a vile horrible thing, because it made him fight to live still. "Demon?"
Aya's response to Youji's improvised code name was deeper, hidden within him. He had fifteen opponents still and the only thing that kept them from ganging up on him was some misbegotten idea of sport between them. It did take two or three of them at a time took keep him from dispatching them faster. They had see him. He or they had to die. Until Youji's whisper through his comlink, he could have gone either way.
He didn't see one of the gangsters behind him pull the gun. It was only a matter of time, doing what they did, that they wouldn't see something coming.
The snap of wire, crunch of sudden amputation, that he heard. Spinning, he saw Youji falling, spinning, black trench coat body armor flaring. His wire came down slower, lingering in the moment of Youji's defeat, even as Youji's life passed before Aya's life.
Youji shouldn't have been between Aya and the bullet. There wasn't supposed to be a dozen extra gang members either. Time crept as Aya withdrew his katana from the belly of a wiry man whose pistol clattered against the cement floor. Rage danced along Aya's skin, along the sharpened length of his katana. They were one being, the man and his sword. Aya had accepted his own death; Youji's death was not acceptable.
Blood splattered over gray cement, an arch from Youji's temple, raining down as if the sky cried red tears. That red was the only red Aya saw as it pooled on the rough cement. Youji hit face down, wound hidden by golden waves of hair that Aya had never gotten to touch.
In his comlink he heard Omi calling to him, saying that Youji had not returned to the pick up point. So distant, Omi's calls were a life time away, separated by hundreds of moments in Aya's memories, moments of Youji's smiles, laughter, dark moods, the cologne Youji wore, hints of flirting, distanced by Aya's endless hopeless need for revenge before new love. Bullets cut through air, snapping like tiny dragons as he moved, cutting down the unplanned for opponents. So little emotion accompanied the movements, slice, kick, see Youji's life, hear his own favorite violin concerto, and under it, Omi's screaming like the final tether to sanity he hadn't known he'd already lost. Revenge had pickled his soul slowly over the years since his parent's deaths, and until that moment, as the last of their opponents fell, Aya hadn't realized what had held him back from complete emptiness.
He turned, sword lowered, the back of his other hand smearing blood where it touched his face. "Youji."