Hello, there.

(Who are you…?)

It doesn't matter.

The feeling of being watched…

(What's this about?)

This? It's about you and me.

(Huh?)

I have you now. I've captured you.

"Hey, Daisuke!" Takeshi screamed from the corner. Daisuke jerked out of his dream, his head snapping up so violently that his neck cracked and he winced, sinking back down onto the desk. It was lunch. He'd slept through the first few classes of the day, and every time it had been the same dream. He didn't know the voice in the dream, but he always woke up when the last sentence was finished.

"Man, you look fuckin' tired. I got jipped by Dark, can you believe it?" he snarled, his hand curled into a fist. "Pushed me off the roof, but I fought him all the way down." And he went on to rave about the previous night. Daisuke switched off his ears after the first sentence.

He continued to rest his head on the wood, which was remotely cool, and thought of a reply. Right, 'pushed'. That's the word for it. You didn't run off the roof, naturally.

"Wow, too bad," he said out loud, smiling with what he supposed was a sympathetic expression. Takeshi bought it: "Aw, I know. At least I got her name. Dunno if I'll see her again though. I got carted away when the police found me and my dad was already pretty pissed off at me."

"Oh."

"That's all you can say? Come on, lunchtime." He was dragged outside, groaning the entire way.

The early morning passed in a kind of blur of his teacher's words. Satoshi wasn't at school, but their teacher didn't give them any assignments to take over to him, oddly enough. Maybe he'd made some kind of formal excuse and had gotten clean out of doing homework. How unfair, Daisuke thought to himself as he worked through a particularly difficult set of radical problems. He gets out of everything, and I've got to handle it all.

Speaking of which, Dark had been religiously sleeping all night and all morning. Maybe this was a good thing.

He looked up from his lunchbox to see Riku Harada approaching him intentfully. Definitely a good thing. He swallowed, a lump rising in his throat that wasn't from any food, and nervously raked a hand through his hair.

Takeshi was talking at him, and he wasn't responding. When he turned to see the reason, he laughed: "Oh, here comes the princess now. Don't screw up, dude."

As Riku stopped just in front of Daisuke, her skirt's hem touching his knees as he sat on the bench looking up at her, she folded her hands behind her back and smiled obscenely wide. "Daisuke, wanna take a walk with me?"

His mouth went dry. He tried not to think of lip gloss and bikinis, and failed. He opened his mouth to say Sorry, if I take a walk with you I might flip out and make an idiot of myself, and found he was saying, "Uh, okay, Riku."

And then, to his horror, he found himself rising off the bench and taking her hand as she reached for his. His chest hurt. He wondered if he was too young to die of a coronary.

They walked. His chest eased up a little. Maybe just a mild heart attack.

And as he forced himself to keep his eyes on Riku, he realized another thing: Dark was sleeping. He wasn't going to transform at all. Why should he be nervous? It was as if half the remaining weight had been lifted from him.

"So I was thinking the other day. We should do something while we're on the field trip, yanno?"

He almost stopped walking, but forced himself to keep moving. "Like what?" he asked miserably, sure that he was missing some subliminal hint. Girls! They never said what they meant. She looked straight up at him, her eyes clear and beautiful, and he felt dizzy all of a sudden. "Things that couples do," she said. "Like… a date, maybe?"

He swallowed again, dryly. "That sounds great," he said honestly. It did sound good. If he could keep himself from transforming long enough to actually be with her. But maybe Dark would be willing to co-operate on this trip. Maybe he could get some time alone with Riku for once.

If he could find something that Dark wanted badly enough to trade.

They were around the backside of the school grounds now, where none of the students bothered to eat lunch because it was too far away from the main campus. There was nobody on either side of them. They stood in the shade of an overhang, a trellis of ivy on one side and a patch of bright green lawn beneath their feet. It was almost peaceful.

But Daisuke Niwa's life was fated never to stay peaceful long, because Riku suddenly kissed him on the lips, their hands still joined. And he found it impossible not to react, and then he was sinking down against the wall and she was kneeling in-between his legs, arms twined in his hair and his hands around her waist. His body seemed to respond in ways he'd never known he could respond, as if remembering some long lost habit.

I've captured you.

He gasped and pressed his head back against the wall, abruptly ending the fifteen seconds of heaven that they'd just experienced. In that one second he knew who had been in his dream, and he recognized the voice.

Satoshi's voice.

"Daisuke?" Riku said, looking extremely hurt. "Don't you… want to?"

"I do, Riku, I do," Daisuke said. Thank God Dark was still asleep. He didn't have to worry about transforming at the moment and he was glad for that much, because he was more aroused than he'd ever been before. "I'm sorry, but--- God. Riku, I'm sorry." He lifted her off his knees and stood, a crease above his eyebrows, and turned towards the main campus.

"Daisuke!" Riku called after him. But before she could do anything else, he ran.

He didn't come back to class.

If anyone had been looking down at Rue Royal in the middle of the night, they would have seen Daisuke half-limping his way up the street. His normally bright red hair was a dark crimson, soaking wet from the downpour of rain, and his clothes sagged on him. They were, after all, meant for Dark.

At least they'd stolen the Wise Man of Sleep. Daisuke hadn't expected it to be an earring, of all things. But that didn't matter. Dark was wearing it now and he'd gone to sleep, leaving Daisuke to find his own way home. I fuckin' hate you, Dark, he said, even though he knew the phantom thief couldn't hear him, or would just laugh at him if he could.

He paused to stop for breath. After they'd stolen the earring, Dark had had a bright idea to sneak into the control room and loop the footage so that nobody would even realize that he'd come almost two hours earlier than the time given on the notice. They'd been caught, and getting out of the museum had been less fun than he'd have liked. Daisuke had tripped over the awning of a roof and fallen all the way into the alleyway below, nearly killing himself—he shuddered to think of what might have happened if he hadn't caught himself at the last moment.

And then he caught it out of the corner of his eye: a flicker of motion.

It wasn't just the rain, pelting down and freezing cold, even for December weather. It was white, and too bold to be part of the scenery.

A spirit? Menou, maybe? No. She had disappeared. Spirits did not come back from the dead.

There it was again.

And again. Somebody was following him.

He stopped, turned to the side, and opened his eyes wide into the darkness, trying to sense out the other person. He wasn't Dark, but he did have some measure of 'sixth sense' per se, and when he realized where he'd seen the flash of white coming from, he darted into the shadows.

He came off the wall and then walked into the alleyway, facing down his opponent, who was leaning against a wall casually, his arms folded across his chest. He was soaked to the bone.

"Satoshi," Daisuke said uncertainly. "What are you doing here?"

"Making sure you get home," came the voice out of the darkness. It was solid, cold, despite the rain and the chill. Daisuke could hardly even make out the outline of Satoshi's figure, since none of the streetlights were on tonight. "There are things around tonight that even Dark wouldn't notice."

"Such as?"

"Doesn't matter what they are. They're not friendly."

"If I die, that makes your job easier, doesn't it?" Daisuke said flatly.

"Not at all. I might have to wait another forty years for a chance at capturing Dark."

Daisuke narrowed his eyes. He did not like the way Satoshi made him feel. At all. It was quite nearly treasonous, a complete confliction of body and mind. He hugged himself with both arms, trying to keep some of the warmth in, and half-turned away from Satoshi. "Well, I'm not gonna drop dead. You don't have to protect me."

"That, I believe, is part of my job," Satoshi said lightly. "My business is in capturing Dark and keeping you safe simultaneously." There was that same conversational tone that he had used at his apartment before, that purring, smooth voice that was so different from his normal voice. Daisuke peered closely into the darkness and caught a flash of some other color: yellow. Gold. Not the white of Satoshi's shirt, but something else that reflected the light, like a cat's eyes.

"…Satoshi… are…you… " Daisuke said, then stopped, trying to collect his scattered thoughts before speaking again. "Who are you?"

"Hm," said Satoshi, and stood up straight against the wall, facing Daisuke fully on. His clothes draped from his form, silk and leather belt and black dress pants, all completely soaked through, and his silver hair caught what light there was and refracted it a thousand times over. It was angelic. It was demonic. No. Something inbetween…?

"I'm me," he said. "That's all." Daisuke could barely see his lips moving, drops of water sliding down his far-too-pale skin in what bare light there was. His glasses were perched on his nose, that stoic visage the same as always.

Daisuke couldn't help but study it.

"It's dangerous to follow me," Daisuke said. "If Dark was awake, he'd…"

"…Kill me?" Satoshi filled in, his voice still demure, low. It wasn't Satoshi's voice. Something else was speaking through him. This wasn't the Satoshi that Daisuke knew, but then, did he really know him at all?

Daisuke took a step back, towards Rue Royal and towards his house. "Don't follow me, Satoshi. I can take care of myself. I don't want anyone to die because of me, okay? Especially not you." He backed a little further away, trying to keep distance between them, lest the feeling in his stomach rise up and overwhelm him entirely.

For a few moments, neither of them said anything.

"You don't know everything about Dark," he said at last. There were two voices this time, one layered over the other. There was Satoshi's normal voice, the one Daisuke was used to hearing at school and otherwise, but even stronger was another: deep and thoroughly male, with a twinge of some kind of accent, nearly unnoticeable. This second voice was seductive, sultry; it wrapped around you like a warm blanket, drawing you in. But within that warmth was steel so sharp that anyone who was drawn in would surely die.

"Satoshi, what's wrong with your voice?" He asked, eyes widening. Each breath his heart beat a little faster as every nerve in his body told him to get the hell out of there. But he held his ground as Satoshi came towards him, slowly and steadily.

"My Tamer is becoming eclipsed," said that odd voice, though it was coming out of Satoshi's mouth. "Soon he'll be nothing but a silhouette. You are simply an obstacle. He belongs solely to me. Make no mistake about that."

"Who are you?" Daisuke demanded. "What're you doing to Satoshi?"

"You already know who I am."

It clicked. "Krad," he said, both a summons and a curse, in a short hiss of breath.

Slowly, Satoshi nodded. There was a maniac gleam to his eye. This was not the usual calm, impassive Satoshi. This was a homicidal killer, someone without remorse or compassion, someone who hated everything that lived. This was Krad. So he was finally getting to meet him, was he?

Suddenly Satoshi's eyes widened. His entire body stiffened and he gave a jerk of his shoulders, falling to his knees in a puddle of water as he was shaken by tremors.

Daisuke just watched helplessly. He wanted to help him, but if Krad was in there… if Krad, that other side that his mother had warned him about, was really awake, then what would happen now?

"It's not time," said Krad. "Not yet. But soon."

And then Satoshi raised his head. His eyes were unfocused, foggy; Daisuke could see no more of that odd gold reflection in them. The pace of the rain quickened and thrummed against the rooftops, and both of them were completely silent, Satoshi kneeling in a puddle and Daisuke backed against a brick wall several steps away. But without warning, Daisuke felt himself gripped by something: anger. White hot anger.

"Satoshi," he said, "Is this all we're supposed to do? Just let stuff happen to us?"

"I don't know," he said crisply. "It's getting harder to fight him. I don't know what that was. He's never tried to do that before. Get out of here, Daisuke. He may try to do it again." Each word was controlled, evenly measured.

"But…" Daisuke moved off the wall. "Isn't there anything I can do to… help?" he recalled Krad's words. Soon he'll be nothing but a silhouette. He paused uncertainly. He knew nothing about Krad except for what his mother had told him: that Krad and Satoshi shared a body and that Krad was Dark's enemy. But he did know that he wanted to help Satoshi. He didn't know why, but he felt as if he ought to. And there was that horrible gut-wrenching feeling again.

"No." With visible effort Satoshi shoved himself to his feet. "You, I believe, are the trigger. Or possibly Dark is. I'm not sure yet."

"But—"

"I'm sorry."

Satoshi turned and walked away, and the darkness swallowed him whole in just a few steps. When Daisuke ran after him, calling his name just twice, he found that Satoshi had gone entirely. But how had he disappeared so quickly, Daisuke wondered? It was almost as if he were part of the air itself. He gave up, filled with despair, and went home. Dark had remained asleep the entire time. It was almost as if he'd been twice as tired as usual. He should have woken up for something like that.

When he finally tumbled into bed, the alarm clock read one oh nine.