Chapter Three:

Ban ducked under the man's clumsy blow and kicked at his assailant's gun hand as he flipped himself backward. The man yelped but did not drop the gun, and Ban growled in disappointment. He pushed his glasses back in place and bent his knees a little, ready to jump out of the way if the man decided to open fire at him.

The man did. Ban sprinted away from the spray of bullets when the man waved his gun around and randomly fired like a maniac, peppering holes in the Monet prints on the wall. So unprofessional. Ban could not help but sneer. Give a loser a gun and what have you got? Same loser.

Ban curled his fingers to a fist and let the man have it right in the face. The poor guy reeled back with a broken nose and a couple less teeth, and then flopped down on the red-carpeted ground in a moaning heap. Another goon appeared behind him and pinned his arms to his side, but Ban easily broke the gorilla's hold.

A couple of blows later and three more of the 'goon squad' were asleep and drooling on the floor. Ban picked up a briefcase from underneath one of them and opened it cautiously. Smiling a little, he replaced the contents the way he found it and snapped the case shut.

It was their target, all right.

"Ginji!" The brunette shouted impatiently for his partner who was at the time caught in the middle of a mob. "Don't waste precious minutes here. Shock them and get it over with!"

Ginji used his fingerless-gloved hand to block one of the men's knife thrust. His eyes strayed for a moment to where Ban's voice had come from. The Jagan master already had one foot on the windowsill, and besides looked royally pissed.

"Uh…right. Sorry," Ginji muttered apologetically at the ski-masked men, summoning the electricity between his hands and letting it flow from his fingers to the surprised gang. The men fell down with a heavy thud, the smell of burnt fabric making Ginji's nose a little ticklish. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and followed Ban out the window. They had a client waiting.

-

"You know, don't you, Ginji?"

Ban brought a cigarette to his lips and lighted it. Ginji just stared at him innocently, eyes widening a little. They had given the suitcase back to the poor woman who had lost it. Now he just wanted to enjoy a decent meal with their pay, the easiest one million yen they had ever come across. And the woman seemed happy enough with the exchange.

Ban sighed at the blank look on his partner's face.

"The lady who hired us was doing it for revenge. That fat businessman we saw earlier in the mansion where the briefcase was kept, do you remember him?"

"Yes," Ginji answered uncertainly.

"He raped her and kept her as a mistress, then had her family killed off years before his organization ever became affiliated with a drug syndicate. She escaped from him, however, changed her name and soon became famous as an artist. Her paintings often depicted men as giants, girls as broken, glass-eyed dolls. It was her anger she was painting. But what she really wanted was revenge.

"That's why she needed us to get the briefcase. It contained everything she needed to connect his name with his illegal dealings. I wouldn't be surprised if the papers tomorrow would have something pretty interesting in it."

"I-I see…" Ginji murmured, feeling very sorry for their client. A lead ball seemed to drop to the pit of his stomach. He suddenly did not have the appetite to eat the remaining sushi on his plate. "What kind of monster could have done that to her?" he wondered aloud, not really expecting an answer.

"The man was…her own father, Ginji," Ban replied with uncharacteristic gentleness. Ginji nearly balked.

"And that's the kind of scum we're up against as retrievers. Some don't even have to wave bloody scalpels around to be called monsters. And maybe the monsters who still claim to be men are the worst."

Ginji nodded. Ban resigned himself to looking at the full moon outside the window of the Honky Tonk, surprised, and slightly disgusted, with himself and his little speech. Why the hell was he being so mysterious anyway? But then maybe his partner needed that. Ginji couldn't continue fighting something he didn't know about, and some knowledge would probably protect him in the long run. The world could be a pretty sordid place, and usually the innocent ones were those who had to suffer in the mud.

-

I have thought of death before.

Other people's death…

…and my own.

Did I only dream my desire for it? It does not seem real anymore.

No, everything is real. Death is as sensual as I thought it would be.

Only I have decided…

It cannot end this way.

-

Akabane pressed his hand on a crumbling wall for support, leaving a bloody smear where he had touched it. Steady, almost clock-like drips of blood flowed from his wounds. He knew moving forward was not reasonable, that he should just go back to the healer's house and announce he was going to stay, but he did not like to admit that he needed help from anyone. No, Akabane would rather die than to go back.

He leaned against a stone structure and winced when his arm brushed against his wound. There was so much blood on his bandages that it was hard to believe it had started out white. At least the blood was not so noticeable because he had managed to drape his black coat over himself. Of course, it was all in keeping with appearances. His cuts were hurting him like hell, but being the methodical professional that he was, he was able to keep it from distracting him.

Akabane allowed himself to slide down to a sitting position, his face flushing a little in humiliation and annoyance. He flexed his fingers and happily noted that they at least were not numb. He clenched them tightly in a sort of restless expectation and dark glee; he had only then remembered that he had not yet killed in a week. The next person he came across would likely never get to see the sun rise if he didn't turn out to be a very interesting specimen indeed.

Akabane leaned back with a wicked smile. His cadaver-pale skin glistened faintly in the moonlight with a light of its own. In some countries, and perhaps it was not wrongly so, white was the color of Death. But white was also purity. And isn't death, even if it was in a morbid, extremely perverse way, a pure thing?

Perhaps Akabane wanted to preserve the innocence of humanity in the only manner he could understand. Perhaps he was reacting to his own latent pain. Perhaps those who were supposed to protect him had failed him in that, or nobody had wanted to protect him from the beginning.

Perhaps every time he killed, he was killing a part of himself that he hated.

Or it might also be that he simply took pleasure in that. Perhaps there really wasn't anything else to him besides being the cold-blooded killer people always took him for.

Whatever the reason that had led the entity called Doctor Jackal to surface in Akabane Kuroudo's soul, it no longer mattered. Akabane had tried to justify his actions before and failed. So he more than willingly took up his old philosophy, which meant he was about to have himself some fun. People may die as a matter of course, but that came as part of the package. He even regarded it as the most natural thing in the world…

…until Amano Ginji spoiled his violent notion of fun.

Ginji-kun, must you ruin everything?

Akabane snapped back to reality when he caught sight of languid movement and saw through the slit in his hat that there was a line of men moving towards him like flesh-eating zombies in some Western movie he had seen before.

He stood slowly up. When they were about ten feet from him he could see that they carried various items which could pass for weapons—knives, an evil-looking meat cleaver, and even something as pathetic as a screwdriver. Akabane could smell something predatory and almost bestial in them, and at that he couldn't hold back a smile. They would soon find that things could get really ugly when they deal with Doctor Jackal.

The men fanned out in a semi-circle and regarded him. He quirked one eyebrow and smiled a little wider. These men were hardly the type of hardboiled fighters who could provide decent sport, which meant it wouldn't be much fun killing them off. But he was still glad for the exercise. He just hoped they wouldn't disappoint him.

Akabane shoved the memory of his talk with the blonde GetBacker somewhere in the back of his mind where it could quit haunting him. Ginji's light seemed to mock everything he stood for. But what really disconcerted him was that he was not entirely sorry for it.

What does this mean then? Akabane shook his head to clear out this half-formed thought too. Now was not the time at all to contemplate on any of it. If he was lucky, he could forget about it altogether after he was finished with the worthless vermin.

-

Blood.

Everything begins in blood…

Life. Memory. Dream. But especially Life.

And so conceivably…

… it ends…