A/N: Hey, how are you all doing? This is a very late update, and I'm very sorry. My computer's broken, so I've had to resort to use my sister's one, and it has a very uncomfortable chair. Thank you to reviewers for the last chapter, virtual cookies for you all! Go on, indulge yourself.
Ame ni Matte
Wait in the Rain
Chapter 12: Play
Someone was mumbling. It was a soft, incoherent murmur, and it was pleasurably heartening. He felt his hair tug a little, and opening his eyes, Yazoo looked carefully down to his right, where grinning sleepily was Kadaj, eyes half closed. One of his hands was smoothing his hair into Yazoo's, so that their silver strands entwined with each other, fanned out across the pillow. Loz was curled up with his back facing them, taking half of the blankets with him. He looked blissfully asleep.
"Same," Kadaj mumbled, twisting some of Yazoo's hair with his. He shifted in the blankets and sat up, leaning across Loz to the broken cupboard. Yazoo stifled a chuckle as Kadaj muttered, "Come on, move you big lump…" and pushed the loose door repeatedly into Loz's stomach. The eldest grunted and rolled over to his other side. Kadaj grabbed something, and returning back to his space in the bed, he started chomping away on his breakfast. Yazoo felt something land on his cheek, and opened his eyes to find his younger brother eating an apple. So what had landed on him was probably a fleck of apple juice.
Kadaj grinned down at him, jiggling the apple slightly. "Morning niichan."
Yazoo sat himself up, taming his morning hair and then doing Kadaj's. "Morning, Kadaj. Did you sleep well?"
"Well, I did to start off with," Kadaj waved a hand carelessly, "but I woke up in the dead of night, busting for a pee. And after I went, I couldn't really get back to sleep."
"Why not?" Yazoo had just noticed how tired and pale Kadaj looked, but in the instant he noticed it, it was masked over with a bright grin and sparkling eyes.
"Loz was snoring," he replied, "he's gotten louder over these days, I swear."
"Shut up, brat," came Loz's muffled response. "Snoring's a sign of an adult. You're just jealous."
"Why would I be jealous of noises that make you sound like an ox?" Kadaj's voice increased in pitch. Yazoo rubbed the sides of his head as Loz made to pummel Kadaj, and the two brothers, through obvious snorts of amusement, broke into the playful fight that they always had.
Yazoo picked up Kadaj's apple (which had rolled across the blankets, forgotten), and took a bite out of it hungrily, glad to eat something that wasn't cold soup. Kadaj flopped onto the blankets, breathless from his laughing, head at Yazoo's knee and legs resting over Loz.
Yazoo smiled at his brothers, listening to their laughs and joining in. It was already a great day.
"I can't believe boss actually agreed for us to become Hojo's walking security cameras." Marshal was in a foul mood. He had been assigned a job he was not willing to do, and he had been turned down. His fellow partner, Lorna, had either not noticed his bad mood, or was avoiding it with the same uncaring air she always had.
Right now, she was taking notes on a palm sized pad whilst looking through a pair of binoculars. She was chewing gum again, and whilst sat on the roof, several wrappers had blown away from her lap and fluttered to the empty street below them. Then only thing Marshal liked about Lorna's gum habits was that the strong mint smell took place of the putrid smell Midgar always seemed to have.
"You know, I think we should go complain," he said loudly. "I mean, we're Turks, we're ruthless trained people who do dangerous missions. We don't do babysitting!"
"Well, ever since you became my partner, my job's always felt like babysitting," Lorna replied dryly. She smirked as Marshal rolled his eyes. "Hey, what do we have here?"
She squinted through the binoculars, arching her eyebrows as a youth with long silver hair stuck his head out from the front door to a narrow house, looking round carefully. The boy fell forwards suddenly, and Lorna shook her head as she saw another boy swinging off the elder one's shoulders. The two were laughing. Marshal, who was looking through his own set of binoculars, casually remarked, "Look pretty happy don't they? Weird though, 'cause I always thought there was three. Didn't give Hojo give us photos and info about the three kids?"
"Hojo gave us the info we needed to know in that file you deemed as crap and didn't bother to read," replied Lorna. "Specimen B 'Loz' has more muscle advancements compared to the other two and has developed a broad spectrum of emotions, whatever that means. Specimen A 'Yazoo' has newly been developed and has unknown characteristics now. Previously labelled as the weakest of the three. Specimen C 'Kadaj' is the youngest – he's probably the one swinging off Yazoo now – and has severe mood swings that have resulted in four casualties."
"Whoa," Marshal commented, "how the hell did he do that?"
"Apparently, he bites people's hands and has a knack for throwing things when he's unstrapped," Lorna replied, adding lowly, "though it wouldn't surprise me if Hojo sent Kadaj down as well to do shooting practice as a way of getting rid of scientists he doesn't want employed."
She watched as the third brother – Loz – stuck his head around the door, saying something to his brothers. "You know," she mused, "for kids, they're quite clever."
"Why?" answered Marshal uninterestedly. "Don't tell me you're praising Hojo's work on his 'specimens'."
"They're squatting in a house, and to hide their presence, they've put their rubbish in the neighbours' bin."
"So? I don't see what's so impressive."
Lorna rolled her eyes, returning her gaze back through her binoculars whilst spitting out her gum. "I just think they're quite smart, quite innocent that's all. They're doing everything they can to hide themselves from the lab when they don't need to. Taking extra precautions because they don't want to be separated again. And there's no success in trying to hide your presence from someone who already knows you're there."
"There's no need to spy on them so intensively, Lorn, all we have to do is make sure they're not dead, and send some stupid report to that madman." Marshal looked at the time on his watch. "Let Hojo hear what he wants to hear about those kids, that they're developing at a supreme rate, whatever he babbles on about these days."
Lorna rolled her eyes and set the binoculars down. "Fine, we'll go and get some breakfast. I ought to know by now that you can't concentrate on work when you've just been rejected."
Yazoo had showered, eaten breakfast and tidied up the ground floor of their new home. He and Loz had spoken quietly to each other during their spring clean, where Yazoo admitted hurting the researcher Deanes. It seemed to be okay to tell Loz, who reassured his younger brother that it was the right thing to do, justifying himself with the same reason Yazoo had come up with, that stopping him from reaching his brothers deserved a punishment. Loz and Yazoo agreed to not tell Kadaj of the incident, knowing he would be fascinated about it so much, he'd probably wouldn't be able to think about anything else, and constantly pester for details.
"Niisan," Yazoo addressed Loz as the two gathered rubbish in a cardboard box. Loz looked up. "You know that finding Mother won't be easy."
"…Where did that come from?" Loz said blankly.
"People may try to stop us, so we ought to keep the gun. Just in case."
"What, one gun between the three of us?" Loz snorted, shaking his head. "Do you know what I really want? A pile bunker."
Yazoo blinked uncomprehendingly, and Loz (who for once, knew more about something than Yazoo did), made up the size of the so-called pile bunker using his hands.
"It's about…that big?" He looked at his hands. "You fit it on your arm and it's a gun with a shield, basically."
"How do you know that?" Yazoo asked interestedly. He didn't know there were different sorts of guns, perhaps he could get something unique to him. Loz reached over and grabbed the newspaper Kadaj had been maiming yesterday.
"It was in here. It was talking about regulations for soldiers or something. Had quite a lot of information before it got destroyed."
Yazoo smiled slightly, and helped Loz to put the bits and pieces of the newspaper into the makeshift bin.
As it grew to around lunchtime, he noticed that their efforts had paid off and where the living room had been a bleak place with rubbish littered everywhere, was now a well dusted room that sported an elegant coffee table Yazoo had spent all morning trying to adjust the legs of so that it was sturdy. Loz, who was really taken to the idea of Happy Families, gushed on happily about how he had managed to make the cooker work. He had also brushed up on his culinary skills reading a recipe book Kadaj had found. The youngest brother, who had limits to how much work he did since he was the youngest after all and had a very low attention span, resorted to lining up a row of books and then going to play on the stairs.
Yazoo hadn't taken much notice at first, but whilst gathering the empty cardboard boxes in the hallway (he seemed to be the only one tidying up now), daydreaming absently like he usually did, he realised that Kadaj would run up and down the stairs, but not bother to enter any of the rooms up there. There was never any sound of doors opening or closing. So, setting down his collection of boxes, Yazoo walked up the creaking stairs to see Kadaj on the landing, peering over the banister.
"Who do you think lived here, niichan?" asked Kadaj as he hung a square of cardboard over the balustrade, dropping it at a well-assessed time so that it landed on Loz's head as he walked back.
"I'm not sure, Kadaj," Yazoo replied, choosing to refrain from rolling his eyes as Loz shouted, "Oy, brat!"
Kadaj laughed to himself, stepping away from the banister and watching curiously as Yazoo made to open one of the two doors that connected to the landing.
"One of them doesn't open," Kadaj explained, a mischievous grin flitting across his face. "I told Loz that a dead person's locked in there, and he actually believed me."
Yazoo found that neither Loz's gullibility or Kadaj's mischief surprised him. In fact, he was happy to hear the two's antics again, teasing each other relentlessly. He opened the door that wasn't locked, wrinkling his nose as a revolting smell filled the air straight away. He got a quick glimpse of the shabby bedroom before deciding he couldn't tolerate it any longer and slammed the door shut. Kadaj pulled on his brother's sleeve and whispered loudly, "I don't think the bedsheet's been changed for about a year."
With disgust, Yazoo nodded in agreement, casting a look of disapproval at the door before turning back to his brother. Kadaj smiled at him with the innocence he usually had. Though Yazoo knew all too well that Kadaj's innocent grin hinted at anything but innocence. He blinked, observing that Kadaj's hips seemed quite oddly proportioned. His left side was sticking out quite far, and on seeing where Yazoo was looking, Kadaj's grin turned impish.
"Have you forgotten something, niichan?" he asked with his expertly feigned adorability.
"…If I have, you've probably got it there…" Yazoo answered slowly. Kadaj cackled playfully, and pulled out from his pocket the gun. Yazoo gasped audibly. He had put the gun in a safe place, hadn't he?Yet there it was now, in the hands of a little boy who thought it was a toy of all things.
"Kadaj, I don't think…" Yazoo started, instinctively flinching as the gun spun round in the air helplessly when Kadaj started throwing and catching it, as though he thought it was a ball.
"You never told me you had a gun!" he exclaimed, beginning to whine enviously. "It's so cool!Did you shoot someone with it? Can I have it? Can I have it niichan?"
No was definitely Yazoo's answer, but he had busied himself with cringing and recoiling as Kadaj aimed the gun at a point only centimetres away from Yazoo's head. And with a manic giggle, Kadaj pulled the trigger. Yazoo jumped on impulse, but instead of a large bang, there was a small click.
Kadaj fell to the floor in hysterics, laughing raucously and taking out the unused bullets from his pockets. They rolled across the stained carpet, and Kadaj laughed even harder, clutching his stomach. Yazoo felt immensely stupid, but more so, furious. Kadaj found playing with a gun to be funny?
No of course not. It was that fact that he, Yazoo, had lost his cool nerve at the sight of a gun with no bullets. Had he really thought Kadaj would fire? Was that really how uptight he was?
Yazoo strode over to the rolling figure on the floor moodily, snatching the gun out of his brother's loose grip and scooping up the bullets. He stuffed the weapon into his back pocket, his temper rising as Kadaj looked up from the floor breathlessly, grinning.
"That was funny wasn't it, niichan?" he snickered. "Maybe I'll try it on Loz too and see if he falls for it too!"
"No," Yazoo said firmly, feeling his face redden in a mixture of humiliation and fury "You're never touching that gun again because it's mine, do you hear me? And by the way, that wasn't funny at all. Not even one bit."
Kadaj crawled to the banister, sticking his head between two wooden posts and clutching onto them with his hands.
"Loz! Yazoo's got PMS again!"
Yazoo's face – if it was even possible – reddened even more and Kadaj grinned over at him, collapsing against the railings and laughing quietly. Yazoo rolled his eyes, glaring with as much ferocity he could muster, but it only served to make Kadaj laugh even more. He sighed and sat on the top stair, raking his hair tiredly. Kadaj was still snickering away, now sat next to Yazoo with his arms draping around skinny shoulders. The impish laugh was right next to Yazoo's ear, and Yazoo had to join in, laughing softly and massaging the sides of his head resignedly.
Their laughter rang down the stairs to where Loz chuckled to himself, unable to hide his happiness from hearing his two brothers, not just one, laughing. He turned a page of his culinary book, and continued to read about spaghetti carbonara for three.
A/N: Ah, Kadaj gives Yazoo so much grief. Please be kind and review – it'd be really cool if I got over 100! Three digit number! Please review!
Next chapter: I'll chuck in some more randomness, probably some Yazoo and Loz interaction.
