- Part Three -

Yagyuu's arm was encased in a support to stop him damaging it further, and while he was naturally too outwardly polite to complain, Niou could practically feel his irritation. They were themselves again, hair and clothes back to normal, and any minute now Yanagi was going to want to know what the hell they thought they were playing at. He'd accepted that they needed to go and get Yagyuu patched up first, but that had only delayed explanations for a little while. This, Niou thought, was just great. Yanagi was annoyed at him for the messages he'd sent, Yagyuu seemed to be on the verge of snapping at him for reasons unspecified, though it was probably projected irritation at his own perceived mistakes. Yagyuu could be like that. And somewhere, three of Hyoutei's finest were going to be pretty damn pissed, too. The only real redeeming feature of the entire affair was sitting in the little box, which he'd been looking after extremely carefully ever since they'd made it out of the complex.

Somehow, the fact that Yagyuu had control of their link with Yanagi again was making him feel faintly paranoid, but it was possibly better than being on the receiving end of Yanagi's somewhat pointed messages. Once the man had realised he was talking to Niou rather than Yagyuu, things had suddenly become rather uncomfortable. Niou had a faint suspicion that he had noticed from the beginning, but would have been prepared to let it slide, had they not fucked up. Yanagi always noticed things you'd rather slip past him. He wondered if the hacker knew about the history of their switch. It wouldn't entirely surprise him.

-----

"Yanagi wants to actually meet with us," Yagyuu informed Niou coldly, resettling his glasses on his nose, "so I suggest you clean yourself up a bit."

His arm was a dull ache which he couldn't quite push from his mind, reminding him of both his current physical weaknesses and his earlier mistakes. Maybe he'd become too used to surpassing Niou, when they were younger; how had it happened that Niou seemed able to perform Yagyuu's role, while Yagyuu failed miserably in Niou's? There was, he had to admit, the obvious factor of cyberware. Yagyuu's mind was unnaturally fast in some respects, and his memory was truly excellent, but his body wasn't quite as tuned up as Niou's. That much he could account for and, if not quite forgive, at least explain. It felt, though, like the difference between them went further than that. He wasn't even sure who had messed up in the end, or if he'd done the right thing, or what would have happened if he'd moved before Niou had. Maybe it would have worked out, or maybe Niou would have been shot; he'd been too afraid of what might happen to Niou to even try. Yes, he'd moved after Niou's first attack, but he'd had to wait to follow his lead. It left a bitter taste in his mouth. Was he a coward? He'd never thought so before, but now the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. He was feeling angry, and there was no-one to take that anger out on except Niou, who he admitted on some level or other probably didn't deserve it. Yagyuu did the only thing he knew how to do: he retreated, putting up the barriers, blanking his partner. Maybe he really was a coward.

Yanagi was waiting for them at the bar, looking smart, relaxed, and not at all angry. Not that appearances meant anything, here. He spoke to them, in a private room, about the importance of maintaining good contact with the rest of the team. Yagyuu felt like an observer; it was Niou who was on the end of this very calm and yet slightly threatening lecture. Niou, who was practically squirming in his seat. It gave him almost a flash of satisfaction to know he wasn't the only one who was perceived as having messed up, though he felt guilty for that thought almost immediately.

Finally, it seemed like Yanagi had made Niou squirm enough (precisely the right amount, knowing the man), and the talk became more general. Niou got the job of delivering the item they'd retrieved, with Kirihara for backup (and if Yagyuu felt further bitterness at that, he pushed it aside quickly; logically, he wasn't in a good state to be making sure nothing went wrong, with only one fully functional arm). Kirihara, they were told, had been the one to run into Akutsu. It sounded like the meeting had been quite unpleasant for all parties involved, but if Kirihara was fit enough to accompany Niou, then it couldn't have been too catastrophic, surely.

The three of them finished talking business, leaving everything else carefully on the sidelines. Somethings, really, were just hard to talk about. But as they went to depart, Niou paused in the doorway, and asked the question, his voice almost a whisper.

"Yukimura?"

Yanagi Renji shook his head.

"Not yet. Maybe not ever. We just don't know."

Yagyuu withdrew a little further.

-----

It had only been a matter of time before the whole thing exploded. Niou, as usual, was the one to trigger it. It was always like this now, when things went wrong between them. Yagyuu withdrew, and Niou found he had to resort to more and more extreme measures to get any kind of response. He knew Yagyuu was capable of feeling emotion, far more capable than Niou himself maybe, and it pissed him off more than he could say to watch problems getting buried deeper and deeper whenever something began to upset the polite man. Niou might block out pain, but he knew Yagyuu just stopped it from showing on his face. Underneath, all he was doing was caging himself in with his emotions, until everything was well and truly out of control inside his head. It seemed so different to the way it had been before, Niou thought, almost a reversal of roles. Niou had been the one with an explosive temper, once, but things changed. Maybe they'd switched roles in this area at some point, without even realising. Maybe the line between them was more blurred than he'd thought, even now. In any case, he was damned if he was going to let Yagyuu drown himself inside his own head.

Yagyuu's anger, if one could succeed in getting him to express it, was impressive. Niou worked at it. Well-placed comments, carefully designed actions, until finally...

"Niou, what the fuck do you think you're playing at?"

Good, he wasn't being polite. Niou must've really got him going. He felt Yagyuu's hand grab his shirt, didn't bother to dodge. It wasn't like Yagyuu could hold him like this and punch him at the same time right now anyway. The man only had one good arm.

"Provoking you. What does it look like?"

"Why?" He felt his back slam against the wall as Yagyuu pushed him away.

What was he meant to say? I want you to tell me what's wrong, because otherwise it's just going to sit between us, and you're so fucking reluctant to talk unless I get you really mad. Or: oh, I just felt like it. Maybe I want some kind of emotional response from you, even if it's anger. Perhaps I don't see why I should be mature if you're not going to be.

He settled for saying nothing. Yagyuu looked about ready to maim him, or maybe break down, or both; the floodgates were wide open already, without further effort on Niou's part.

-----

It sort of felt better, afterwards, when he could think clearly again. He knew that Niou did this on purpose, and that he did it for a reason, but somehow he lost sight of that every time something of the kind actually happened. He felt more than a little ashamed about the whole thing -- his lack of self control in the face of Niou's deliberate provocation, how badly he took losing at anything, falling short of perfection. At least he felt calmer now; perhaps, really, Niou was right. He did need to just let everything out from time to time. It wasn't something he found easy to do, though. He was too used to guarding what he said all the time. At some point, it had reached the stage where he had to be forced into opening up.

Niou knew that, of course. He must know that; he was far too familiar with Yagyuu to overlook such a basic aspect of who he was. They would never be people who could express their feelings to one another with absolute freedom. That, he supposed, was probably a part of why the switch had come about in the fist place, all those years ago. It was an attempt to get under the skin of another person, an attempt to understand something which seemed utterly alien. The depth of similarity between them revealed by their experiment was surprising, at the time, and in the aftermath of switching, in the aftermath of their fight, Yagyuu was surprised by it all over again.

The apartment was quiet now, though he had yet to decide if that was a blessing or a curse. Niou was gone, to make his delivery with Kirihara, leaving Yagyuu space to think. He wasn't sure if he wanted space to think. While he definitely had a lot of things he should be thinking about, sometimes what he thought he craved was simplicity. Not thinking about things too deeply made life that little bit easier, that little bit more straightforward. When possible he avoided analysing certain of his feelings altogether, for more or less this reason. He supposed this was how he'd been caught so completely by surprise when, just before he left that evening, once Yagyuu had run out of anger, Niou Masaharu had leant in towards him and kissed him. It had been a rough kiss, forceful and inelegant, but it had made his breath catch, and he'd responded almost before he knew what he was doing. Simplicity was suddenly a long way off, and he had a feeling it was going to be a while before it returned, if it ever did. Wasn't that always the way, though, with Niou?

Tonight, Yagyuu decided, he really didn't know anything for sure. Nothing was going as he expected it to, no-one was acting in ways he anticipated, and maybe he'd been wrong all along about what he wanted. It wasn't the first time Niou had kissed him, but it was the first time since they were young. He'd almost managed to forget the feeling of it, in the years they'd been apart. Nothing with Niou was straightforward, nothing was ordinary, and maybe he'd liked it that way. Maybe he'd just forgotten that, too. Maybe he'd managed to keep himself just detached enough, ever since Niou re-entered his life, to stop himself remembering.

He wondered what was going to happen now, and realised that he couldn't even begin to imagine.

At some point, he must have drifted into sleep, because the next thing he knew, Niou was shaking him awake. Kirihara was standing in the background, in constant restless motion. Yagyuu only needed to note the strained edge to Niou's voice and the look in his eyes to know that something was very, very wrong.

-----

Niou was in a good mood as he headed out to meet Kirihara. Things with Yagyuu had gone more or less as he'd anticipated, and it felt like they'd cleared the air a lot. Yagyuu had stopped being angry at him; now all he could do was hope that the other man would come to the correct conclusions about Niou's parting action. It'd been fun to kiss Hiroshi, and possibly had been long overdue, but the man had to be handled correctly. Niou didn't want to screw this up; he'd already done that once. If he and Kirihara could just sort out the hand-over quickly, he could get back to the apartment. Though leaving Hiroshi hanging was somewhat entertaining. He hadn't even given him a chance to say anything before he'd waltzed out of their home, restraining himself from laughing.

Kirihara was at their meeting point before him, looking a bit scratched up but more or less intact, scruffy as ever. He nodded to Niou, who treated him to a dazzling grin.

"Kirihara. Heard you'd been hanging out with Akutsu. How's the bastard doing?"

The younger man rolled his eyes and shrugged, hands digging deeper into the pockets of his patched jeans. He didn't seem to think the question deserved a response, though Niou caught a hint of a smile, quickly smothered. The pair fell in step, wandering along easily as though they were going nowhere in particular, exchanging insults as others might exchange small talk. Niou quite liked Kirihara, really, when he wasn't in a situation which required or could conceivably require demolition work. He thought Kirihara quite liked him, too. They showed it in their own little way.

The hand-over was scheduled to take place in a fairly remote location, which didn't strike Niou as too promising. It didn't necessarily mean anything, but there was a slightly smaller chance of getting screwed over if you were doing your deals in a bar. Owners of such places tended to frown upon people getting blood on the soft furnishings; a little piece of insurance against some of the bastards out there, though not a guarantee. Still. Maybe their man just wanted a greater level of discretion, a lesser probability of running into someone he knew; could be anything. If Yanagi had figured out the identity and loyalties of the person they were working for, he hadn't seen fit to share. All they could do was get there, wait, and hope.

They arrived early and made a few passes around the outside of the building, checking for anything obviously wrong. It all checked out, and the two of them settled down a few blocks away to wait for the appropriate time. It didn't do to show up too early; it indicated an obvious lack of trust. Of course people checked out the place first, just like you'd try to check out your employer for anything interesting or dangerous, but it wasn't polite to do so openly. Niou wouldn't normally care about politeness -- that was Yagyuu's department -- but it was a little different in this situation. It wasn't done, even by Niou Masaharu, and apparently not even by Kirihara. Some things would just be asking for trouble.

When it was a little past time, they went down to the building, walking inside without apparent hesitation, though Kirihara would have been performing the same instant check of the area as Niou was. It was another one of those things you just did.

There was no-one inside. They were a little late, and the place was empty. By this time, Niou was feeling distinctly uneasy; you got a kind of sense, after a while, of when something wasn't going the way it should, and this was it. Kirihara was walking around, almost silently, checking out the extremes of the building as though expecting to be jumped on at any moment. It didn't seem like paranoia to Niou, at that moment. Any moment now, something bad was going to happen. He was really glad he had his implants; they couldn't be taken off him. Well, a part of him added, they could; but if it got to that stage he'd have more pressing concerns.

Kirihara let out a hiss of breath, and stooped to examine something.

"What've you found, kid?" Niou asked, tensing a little.

"Fucking... bastards. Stupid, incompetent bastards," Kirihara gave a little laugh, as devoid of humour as Niou's own often was. "Explosives. Did they think we wouldn't notice? You might want to shift it about now," he added, almost an afterthought.

"How long?" Niou was already moving.

"Don't know," Kirihara snapped. "Look, even they weren't stupid enough to put a damn screen with a neat little countdown on it, just go!"

They were outside by the time the place blew, dashing around a corner when the world became, briefly, bright and loud and full of the kind of excitement Niou could really do with less of.

"I bet I get blamed for that one, too," the explosives expert grumbled. "Something blows up, it must have been Kirihara. Because no-one else in this city would do such a thing."

"You're asking for it, boy," Niou swatted him playfully across the back of the head, "besides, it usually is you."

His mind was in overdrive, racing through scenario after scenario. He hadn't seen that coming. Snipers or something, possibly. His best guess had been a bunch of toughs to take them out through sheer weight of numbers; it wouldn't have been street samurai or anyone so sophisticated as that. Be it freelance individuals like themselves or hiring through a makeshift organisation like Hyoutei, even people of their kind thought some things were dirty. You didn't do it because it was too low a trick, and you wanted to think that no-one would do it to you. He hadn't factored in something like the trick which had actually been pulled because, had it worked, the tech they were carrying would almost certainly have been destroyed, and everything that had occurred to him was based on the assumption that their employer wanted the goods without the hassle of actually conducting business with them. Niou could see several steps ahead in any game; dozens of steps, sometimes. The problem here was that the game being played wasn't the one he'd thought it was. It wasn't a game he knew, and he wasn't too sure of the rules. He wasn't even sure if the explosives had been a serious attempt to kill them, or if whoever had set it up had believed that they would figure it out and escape; either way, the purpose of the exercise was unclear to him. Were there people waiting for them outside in case they escaped? Examining their surroundings didn't reveal anyone nearby, but that didn't mean a thing. Anyone who was going to be a serious threat to them wasn't going to be easy to spot unless they wanted to be. It was safe to assume that they were, at the least, being watched. Someone, somewhere, would want to know how things had gone.

"We're going to leave now," Niou muttered, "people might shoot at us or something. I don't have a fucking clue any more."

No-one shot at them, and that almost made Niou more nervous. It seemed to further indicate that this was in no way a simple situation they'd managed to get themselves into. Had been forced into, more accurately. They took a winding route away from the area, taking buses, walking, using trains. Anything to try and throw the people who might or might not be observing them, although it was impossible to tell if it worked. When Niou figured they'd achieved all they were going to, he began to steer them back towards the apartment he shared with Yagyuu. They needed to talk to Yanagi, urgently, and should probably find somewhere to stay which wasn't their permanent home, at least until they figured out what was going on. There was a sense that everything was about to fall apart, and spectacularly; if only he knew why. What had they done to deserve this? His mind could supply a few answers to that in terms of general karma, had he believed in such things, but nothing specific.

Yagyuu was asleep when they arrived, sprawled a little awkwardly on the sofa, his glasses clutched in one hand. He looked softer like that, as always; it was probably one of the few times when he was actually relaxed, Niou reflected. It seemed a shame to disturb him, but they didn't have time to wait for him to wake up, really. A little reluctantly, Niou leant in to shake him lightly by the shoulder of his good arm.

"Hiroshi? Hey, wake up," he sighed, "come on."

Yagyuu's eyes drifted open, focused on his face, drifted to note Kirihara's presence with well-concealed surprise for someone who still looked half asleep, returned to Niou. He frowned, slipping his glasses on before attempting to sit up.

"What happened?"

-----

"We could be totally screwed, really," Niou finished. He felt tired. Everything was beginning to sink in properly now, as he explained to Yagyuu. Someone had actually tried to kill them. It wasn't like being shot at; that happened in an instant, a spontaneous reaction to a situation. This had been planned out, and realising that made Niou feel cold. Without Kirihara, he might not even have noticed. It wasn't the sort of thing he'd been looking for. Yagyuu was looking at him with a kind of horror, though the signs were only there for those who knew him well; he'd probably realised just what Niou was thinking. Maybe it was only thanks to the fact that the explosives expert had replaced Yagyuu at short notice that no-one had died.

"I'd better contact Yanagi," Yagyuu said, at last.
"I already did," Kirihara replied, unusually quietly, "he sounded kind of scary. He's... looking into the whole thing now."

There was something passing between the three of them that couldn't quite be put into words. Niou had come closest, really; they could be totally screwed. They could be caught up in something they were powerless to prevent. Kirihara might have said it almost felt like they'd been damned, were waiting to see when someone would show up to claim them; but the older two might have laughed at dramatic little Kirihara.

Niou would have observed that in some ways, they'd been damned for a long time; he'd have said it with a grin, dismissive, but would have meant it. That was almost what it meant to be in their line of work, however much most of them worked to ignore the fact that they were frequently living on a combination of luck, skill, and borrowed time.

No-one said anything. There wasn't any point, really. Kirihara waited uneasily as Niou and Yagyuu gathered the things they considered important, and then they left, walking out into a cold night. If this was the way things were going, they could at least meet the problem head-on, without hesitation. It'd always been the way they'd handled things, when they had been the group known as Rikkaidai.