A/N
This chapter is special to me in many ways. It has been sitting on my computer for 3 years, waiting for the story to reach this point; it is also based on a true story and a true person. If you don't usually read my author notes (I can understand that, they're long) I hope that this one time, you will.
WARNING: chapter contains slurs/a problematic character
The apartment, apparently, had a tiny balcony adjacent to the kitchen. Shiro only discovered that after looking for his uniform in every nook and corner, then suspecting that Roberta might have thrown it out a window, upon which he had gone to peek outside the kitchen.
Dressed in a crisply air dried robe, Shiro continued his routine of exploring slightly different paths to work each morning. Sooner or later he would run into a park of some kind. Somewhere he could take nice, long walks. So far, Rome had shown a disturbing tendency towards high buildings and claustrophobically narrow streets which left little to no possibility for orientation.
Really though. Who on earth thought it was okay to walk into the private space of a complete stranger, grab every object not in a drawer or nailed to the wall, and start cleaning? Wasn't that intrusive as fuck? Or was it only intrusive to someone who had spent a good many years at an orphanage and physically beaten people up for poking in his stuff unbidden?
No, he decided. No, that was pretty damn intrusive.
It didn't take Shiro long to notice he was being followed – in part because the narrow streets offered little in terms of hiding, and in part because small children and stealth are words you'll rarely find in the same sentence. The girl lost interest in her spy game after a block or so and ran after him, a little bouncy thing with an off yellow overalls dress that looked homemade and well loved.
"Hi! What's your name? I'm Maria." Maria looked at him as if asking people's names was her favourite thing in life, which meant that it was also everyone else's favourite thing in life.
"Alexander."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"I'm six!" She thrust up six fingers, just in case he couldn't count. "You can tell because I'm getting my six year molars – wanna see?"
"No."
Little children have many talents. Aside wailing and pooping they're an excellent source of information you don't want. Also their mouths open surprisingly wide.
"Where are you from?" she asked, barely giving herself time to get the fingers out of her mouth and wipe them on the dress: Shiro added 'drooling' to his mental list of kid talents.
"Japan."
"Where's that?"
If he just ignored her she would stop.
"Why are you dressed like that? Are you a priest? Why is your hair so weird?"
Were you allowed to hit kids in Italy? You must be, right? Question being if you were allowed to hit others' kids…
"Why don't you say anything?"
"Why don't you shut up?" he grunted and lengthened his stride.
"You speak funny! Say something more!"
"Yeah? Get lost: I hate brats."
If he started chanting maybe he would get lucky and find her fatal verse. He might have, if he hadn't found himself face to face with a compact chunk of dog. It was more like a small bull, with heavy head and even heavier body, and "chunk" really was the first word that came to mind. Shiro recognised that kind of breed from True Cross. You'd find it in the areas people were told to stay away from, areas where certain gangs kept dogs to intimidate and, to enforce that intimidation, to fight. Shiro knew what dogs like that could do to people. The way the animal tensed and stared at him, he suspected that it, too, knew what it could do to people. Without taking his eyes off the dog, Shiro slowly moved his hand to the pocket where his knife was. If they had walked in on its territory and it for whatever reason decided it didn't want them there…
"Gino!"
Little children have many talents. Before a dumbfounded Japanese exorcist, Maria threw her arms around the dog's neck and transformed it into a tail-wagging, bouncing ball of joy. She just giggled happily when it slobbered all over her face, and wiped herself off once more on the dress that had once, maybe, been bright yellow. The dog took its chance to dive in under her arm, sniffing and buffing at her pocket and pushing her backwards as it did.
"Wait, wait! You'll get it! Wait, boy!"
Gino did wait, but reluctantly so: he danced impatiently on the spot, tail whipping back and forth like a wind-up toy. Maria was no better, tearing and fumbling to get the treat out of her pocket fast enough. Shiro didn't even catch what it was before it vanished from her little hand with generous amounts of grateful licking and buffing.
"This is my dog", Maria explained with a smile that glowed on her face. "Gino!"
"Uh-huh." Gino was dirty and collarless and not really anyone's dog: but the way he put his heavy body between Shiro and Maria made it clear what his position on the matter was. "You're his human, at least."
The statement left Maria uncharacteristically quiet. She looked at him as if she hadn't fully understood what he said, then looked at Gino in case the dog had a better understanding of weird foreigners who couldn't speak proper Italian.
"He likes you", Shiro elaborated with a slight undertone of annoyance. "It looks like he adopted you, not the other way around."
"Maria?" a woman's voice called out from a branching street. "Maria, you've forgotten your lunchbox!"
Maria's beaming face turned to wide-eyed alarm. She gave Gino's butt a shove and whispered at him to go hide, and not to follow her as she ran back towards the voice.
Shiro took the opportunity to head down another branching street. A minor detour from his planned route to class, but what are detours if not an opportunity to discover new things? Like peace and quiet.
Shiro unfolded the paper from his pocket. A tourist map had found its way to his mail compartment, with the meet-up spot for today's pharmacology class marked with a red circle and a scribbled hour. Their meeting place was a church on the southern side of the river, not far from Castel Sant'Angelo where Samael had taken him for a historical tour. He was almost there, but that 'almost' was a force to be reckoned with, as all ancient cities had their street layout done by intoxicated fruit flies. The map, on the other hand, was the work of a high schooler on detention who had about five hundred things they would rather do than sit and draw maps. Several of the streets Shiro had passed by in the last ten minutes had been left out of the illustration, either because they were too small, too insignificant, or too many, with the end result that he had no way of estimating where exactly he was.
"Eh, excuse me, sir?"
Never in his life had Shiro been addressed as "sir"; he almost turned around to see if she had been talking to someone more dignified and sir-like. But no, they were the only two people on the narrow cobblestone street. The woman was not from around town. If the thick accent and the battered city map in her hands weren't clue enough, Italian women would rather have their nails pulled out than be seen in central Rome in shapeless jeans shorts and a shirt that looked like its last encounter with an iron was in 1962. The hints of grey in her short, brown hair added further to the impression of someone that had been dragged out of a low-end thriftstore and hurriedly dusted off to minimal presentability.
…what was up with these European women being so tall?
Shiro straightened his back for an extra centimetre or two. "Yes?"
"I can't figure out where I am", she confessed with an apologetic look. "I was going to the Pantheon but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Could you show me where we are now?"
Shiro accepted the map from her and turned it in his hands. He wasn't that familiar with the layout of Rome but if he got the map the right way around he could locate the Tiber and go from there.
He probably could have, if the map had been of Rome, and if the woman hadn't jammed his hands together and tried to force a cable tie loop over them.
Instinctively, Shiro pulled back – she didn't let him. The loop tightened, the edges of the plastic band were sharp against his skin, and Shiro's brain kicked into reverse mode: if you can't pull, push. He slammed into her with his entire body mass, a motion strong and unexpected enough for her to lose her grip. She stumbled backwards but regained her balance quickly: still, it bought Shiro enough time to wring his hands out of the cable tie and put some distance between himself and the woman who was absolutely not a tourist.
There was no lost, apologetic look on her face. She beamed with excitement – like Maria, if Maria had been older, and insane, and brushed her teeth with river silt – and sank into the raised-fist slouch of a boxer anticipating the opponent's next move.
"Whadda'ya want?" he spat, knife in hand and not taking his eyes off her for a second, barely even daring to blink. Fighting demons was one thing. They were nasty shits, but they were nasty shits he had a pretty good grasp on. Humans, now that was different.
"Why don't we find out?" she grinned, every tooth outlined in muddy brown, and dove into his personal space.
It was a fight against his own body as much as it was a fight against the assaulting flagpole. She was human, and that made his heart leap up and choke him worse than any multi-headed, venom-spitting monstrosity from Gehenna could. Gasping, all he wanted was to bolt out of there, every synapse in his brain was firing red alert messages telling him to run, whatever it took. His training and his knife didn't matter. His enhanced strength didn't matter. His movements were a blur to him, and hers were a series of expertly coordinated grips and twists. She might as well have used magic: she had the knife wrested out of his hand in no time, and the only reason she hadn't tied his limbs in a bow was because he dashed out of reach as soon as she tried to initiate close combat. She almost got him, once, but he threw her over his back into what would have been a bone-breaking fall if she hadn't twisted around mid-air and landed with her feet on the cobblestone.
"Oooh~ tough one, tough one!" Her eyes flashed, the grin danced on her lips. "Tell you what: if you come peacefully, I won't knock you out. How's that sound?"
She was toying with him. Fucking toying with him.
"If you tell me what's going on I won't beat the shit out of you: how does that sound?"
"Haa!" Shiro flinched: there was no telling if that was a laugh or some feral, barking noise meant for scaring. "I like that! Hold on tight to that attitude and come at me, boy!"
Fighting hand to hand, without the knife, was easier – but it wasn't nearly enough. He threw a right hook that met with air and a hand slapped down on the back of his head; next thing Shiro knew he was wrapped up in a tight headlock, and her arm was constricting around his throat like a nutcracker. He hammered fists into her gut and back, as hard as he could, but there was ringing in his ears and black fuzz closing in on his field of vision.
The last thing that went through his mind before he passed out was the people that had mysteriously gone missing all over Rome.
"Hngh…" How long had he been out? Shiro blinked rapidly, willed himself fully awake. He was on the floor of a vehicle. In a body bag. Startling as that was, it was only zipped up to his chin and left him free to look at his surroundings. The smell of warm plastic and rarely cleaned car filled the air, and something he couldn't place – something pungent, saturated: coffee-like yet not. The radio had come down with a sore throat and rasped out old standards as best it could, with good help from a woman singing along in the driver's seat. Shiro turned his head: lying on the floor had pushed the glasses askew on his nose. Not much he could do about it. That cable tie from before was snugly fit around his wrists inside the body bag.
Snap it – his first instinct, first spinal reflex response to being restricted because in truth, the ties chafed his mind more than his body.
"You're not really bound if you know you can break free whenever you feel like it", he reassured himself, acutely aware that acting rashly in this situation could be the last mistake he ever made.
"First impressions?" the kidnapper asked. Her singing voice was vastly different from her come-peacefully-and-I-won't-knock-you-out voice. And there was something about it. Something…
"Of what?" Shiro grunted, eyes darting around the car – van, more like – for possible escape routes. He could try to pinpoint what the thing with her voice was when he wasn't being carted off to an unknown location.
"You woke up. What's the first thing you took note of?"
"The strangled cat that woke me."
Her singing had been good, to be fair, but at the moment fair was not part of Shiro's repertoire.
"Hmm you say~?" She sounded pleased, in that smug way that made Shiro want to annoy the hell out of her. He tried, too. Being a little shit was one of his favourite hobbies, but nothing he said or did made her quit her sing-along after that. It was all a game to her – his struggle, his powerlessness, his anger.
Fucking toying with him.
He could have torn free of the body bag and straps – that would have thrown her off balance. He could have. But the van wove its way through Rome's bustling streets, and Shiro let it.
The van did stop eventually. The side door slid open, and Shiro made sure to be as limp and heavy as possible when he she grabbed the unzipped top part of the body bag and pulled him out on the ground. His heels hit gravel with a thud, his senses strained to maximum capacity to take in all details, evaluate every possible outcome of whatever was going to happen. A groove formed in the ground as he was dragged further away from the car, the outside of which was an anonymous white, like every van you instinctively feel you should not come too close to. Behind it rose the familiar façade of St Peter's Cathedral, though this side of it would mostly be recognised by Vatican personnel: this side overlooked the Papal Gardens, not the famous Square. Speaking of familiar, there were some faces he recognised when he was dumped among the other five body bags on the lawn. Well. Given that they were all exorcists, and all planning to take the Doctor Meister–
"It appears that we have been kidnapped." Andrew shared his deduction with grave professionalism. "But don't panic: we have reason to believe the kidnapper may, in fact, be working for the True Cross."
"Wow. You're a sharp one." Shiro rolled over on his belly with a grunt and caterpillared himself up to a sitting position, itching to be free but keeping tight reins on that need: no funky stunts in front of an audience. "Did you talk her out of beating you up, too?"
"He doesn't fight women, remember?" Larry muttered. While Andrew and Remo looked fine, his face was blooming shades of red that would deepen to blue and purple within a few days.
"He acts like one, ya mean." Their ever-generous kidnapper took the time to kick Andrew in the shoulder on her way back to the van, hard enough for him to fall over sideways. Shiro clenched his teeth: if only he'd been smart enough to pay closer attention to the "tourist" in the alley. What tourist wore army issue steel-toed boots?
"What is wrong with you?!"
Shiro had been through plenty of surprises that day, yet he was not prepared when Remo, of all people, launched into the verbal version of anti-airstrike artillery. At least he assumed that's what it was. The shouting sounded distinctly like Italian, but no Italian Shiro had ever heard.
The kidnapper was an uncanny kind of quiet. For the longest time she just stood there and listened to Remo's lecturing, one hand on her hip, wearing the expression of one thoroughly enjoying the performance of a circus animal.
"You know nice guys die first, right?" Her grin widened a millimetre more: the tip of her boot nudged Remo's chin upward. No one so much as breathed, least of all Remo. "Nice guys with their Jesus complex, always aching for a chance to die for others. See how ya howl like a burnt pig when I kick your buddy, but when it's your own ass in for a spanking you just take it?" She planted her feet on either side of Remo and sat down on her haunches, leaning further into his face when he tried to put some space between them. "Deep down you're just longing to die, aren't ya?" Her voice dropped low, intimate: a temptress sharing secrets with her lover. "Waiting for that perfect moment when your life can finally mean something, and everybody will be forced to recognise what a truly nice guy you were."
Shiro could only guess what her breath smelled like from that distance, and what kind of thoughts were swirling in Remo's mind. If it had been him, he would've headbutted her. Hard. For being a more annoying little shit than him.
"If that is your idea of kindness, I understand why you reject it."
Remo's calm words sent a vicious snarl down Shiro's spine. Nothing's more grating than pity. Nothing's more revolting than superiority passed off as humility.
Shiro just might have headbutted Remo, too.
The kidnapper inhaled deeply through her nose and let the breath out with a content sigh.
"That's the smell of youth. Equal parts optimism and ignorance." As far as smells were concerned, Remo looked like someone had shoved a wedge of raw onion up his nose. The woman rose to her full height in a fluid motion. "It's you bumblebees that keep the world afloat. Till it kills you." She didn't kick him: she braced her boot against his chest and disdainfully shoved him down on the ground, hard enough for an 'oof' to leave his lungs. "Get acquainted with black widow over there, she might have a pair of spare balls for you."
Without another glance back, she climbed into her van and drove off.
"I was gonna say she's a bitch", Larry muttered, "but I'm pretty sure she's just plain fucking insane."
"Are you hurt?" Andrew tried to wiggle over to Remo. "Do you need help?"
"No." Remo sounded like he was being choked by an invisible weight on his chest. "Got the wind knocked out of me."
"She's pissing on us, is what she bloody is", Larry continued with heat. "Like a damn storm drain. And we will make her regret that. She will taste the humiliation each of us has been put through today, threefold, with an extra serving of pain."
Sweet music to Shiro's ears. Only, Larry's little speech was more venting than actual plan.
As for the black widow… There were two unfamiliar faces in the assembly of body bags, and Shiro would not have guessed that one of them was a girl if the kidnapper hadn't said so. They both had short hair, for starters – or so he thought. A second look revealed that one of them – a brown-skinned individual silenced with a strip of duct tape – actually had black cloth smoothed over their head, like a second skin. It gathered in a weird-looking bun just above a forehead lined with so many furrows you'd think somebody had used a second bit of tape to stick their eyebrows to their scalp.
The other reminded Shiro, awkwardly, of one of Samael's demon bedmates. It was the dark tone of the skin, the full lips, and the tightly cropped black hair that was similar to that of the succubus; the rest could not have been more different. There was no bestial, erotic hunger in those eyes, no feline sensuality in the lines around the lips. Instead there was an air of composure and distance about their person, an impression helped along by a headband of animal fur that looked like some sort of tribal crown.
"We haven't met, so: Alexander Fujimoto." He nodded at the two strangers.
"Dazuluka Tshabalala: Luka, for short." The voice was a woman's, and much friendlier than her looks. Head-bun made unintelligible noises through the duct tape.
"Think our first Doctor class will be a lecture in patching each other up?" Shiro suggested with a lopsided smile as he noticed that Luka's right eye had started to swell shut, and that the darkened crust on her lip was nosebleed. Larry and Remo both gave up amused snorts, but Luka didn't so much as twitch a smile.
"What I worry about is that this may have been our first test", she said in flawless Italian.
Shiro had not thought of that. Now that he did, and glanced over the bagged, beaten exorcists, they might as well swing by Battista's office after class and hand in their badges.
"Good thing we're not sitting here like a bunch of malformed mermaids fresh out of the trawler, then." Larry put words on his thoughts with a dry muttering – then suddenly grimaced and hissed something between his teeth.
"Are you okay?" Andrew worried.
"Mh. 'm fine." He looked like someone had just decorated his tender parts with clothes pegs. "Except the nutjob dislocated my finger."
You'd think Remo was the one with a dislocated finger, the way his features contorted while he questioned and nannied Larry about the injury. Injuries. Like Shiro, Larry had put up a fight, and apparently done it well enough that she had had to use an iron pipe to knock him out.
"Flute." They all looked at Luka, who repeated herself helpfully: "She hit him with a flute."
"You weren't there, sweetheart."
"She hit me, too. It's a flute."
"It was an iron pipe."
"No. It was a flute."
The debate carried on fruitlessly about the nature of the object they had been hit with, until the sound of wheels crunching over gravel approached. The white van arrived seconds later with a double delivery. Gianpiero was dumped on his back next to them, and tipped himself upright by lifting his legs in the air to use as counter-weight.
"This, is why I never travel economy class", he announced, and if there was a slight tremor to his voice he was determined not to acknowledge it.
Flavio got dropped a few metres in front of them. His mouth was opening and closing in a face that was as red as Larry's but for different reasons; he looked like he might be trying to swallow a bagful of dynamite sticks. Flavio went for Shiro's method, flopping over on his stomach to drag himself up from there, but only got to a sort of kneeling fetal position before the kidnapper decided to use him as a chair. Feet wide apart and hands on her knees, she looked like a very thin sumo wrestler.
"Alright, limpdicks: iiintroductions. Officially I'm Johanna Stridsberg. Not Ma'am Stridsberg, Professor Stridsberg, or Lady Stridsberg." She gave them all a once-over, and this time there was no doubt that she was sizing them up. "To you I'm Mad, of Section XIII of the Order of the True Cross: for blue-blood fags that like long titles. The rest call us Iscariot. We get the work done no matter how dirty it is." She cracked a grin that was every lexical definition of dirty. "An' this here", a folded piece of paper emerged from her chest pocket, "is my current to-do list."
That's where Shiro had heard that voice: the Order. The Barracks. The female voice shouting profanity when that stench had exploded in the corridors.
Mad whipped a pair of reading glasses out of the same chest pocket. They were the kind of glasses somebody's great-aunt might wear, if said great-aunt also favoured permed grey hair and shock-red lipstick: and alpine skiing, maybe. While the rims were thick, and red, and tapered into tips at the sides, the glass was the kind of traffic cone orange Shiro had only seen in the winter Olympics on TV.
"Sir Andrew Austin Angel."
"Yes."
Mad looked up, then back down to her paper. A concerned look pulled over her features, like when you notice an unpleasant smell of smoke from the kitchen, as her lips quietly mouthed through the name again.
"Did you kill your parents?"
"What have you done to my parents?!"
"Nothing: I asked what you have done about your parents."
"I would never do anything to harm my parents!"
"My condolences." Mad dropped her gaze back to the roster. "Larry Brooks."
Larry gave a most uncooperative grunt.
"What's that? You fart or something?"
The corners of his lips twitched into a sarcastic smirk.
"Yeah."
"Explains all the crap coming out of there."
"That's rich, coming from someone who looks like she just ate a plateful of it", he returned without missing a beat.
"Like all Vatican employees."
Shiro couldn't decide if it was entertaining or infuriating. While slugging Mad in the face had featured solidly in the top five of things he wanted to do in life for the past half hour, the thought of tossing insults with her was oddly appealing, too.
"Count Flavio Capponi." Mad continued her roll call, and her chair let out an unamused 'yeah'. "S'that you, Count? Looking less inbred than I had expected. Alexander Fuyeemoto."
"Yeah."
Mad peered at him over the red rim of her glasses.
"What's your name?"
"Alexander Fujimoto", he repeated so she could get the pronunciation right.
"Your real name, chinky", she clarified in an unceremonious grunt.
Shiro blinked. Ran through his vocabulary again. Chinky? He really needed to keep his dictionary around.
"Shiro."
Checking her list again, she made an odd face.
"Shiiroo Fudgimoto?"
"Not really but I suppose it's the best you can do."
There are some people it's fine to piss off and some you want to keep happy at all costs: then there's Mad, where happy and pissed off were just different flavours of disturbing. She skipped towards Shiro, on her haunches, like some peculiar imitation of a rabbit that would have cracked him up if he hadn't suspected that would get his teeth kicked in. Moments later she was all up in his face with her frayed grin and that pungent smell from the van.
"Well well well: if it ain't the next Paladin? Most honoured to be teaching ya, sir." She bowed her head with a flourishing hand motion. "You're gonna need to work on your close combat skills if you want to get your proper title."
Shiro didn't know what he wanted. Strangle Samael, yes, but he wanted to do that on a daily basis. Right now he wanted to turn back time and strangle him before he could utter that stupid fucking sentence at the Round Table hearing just to get a rise out of Beaumonde – just to push another button 'cause oh lord did Samael enjoy pushing people's buttons.
"Only madmen say I'll be next Paladin." He tried to sound like it was something so obvious it shouldn't even need to be addressed.
Stridsberg had been turning away, not expecting an answer. When he did answer, she turned back and leaned into his face with eyes wide open and an even… happier? …grin.
"I know which madman said that." She removed herself from his face, swivelling around on one foot so she no longer squatted across his legs. "That's why I'm telling ya: work on your combat skills. I don't wanna get shit from the higher-ups for training a crappy Paladin."
Mad rabbit-hopped back to her chair, leaving Shiro to wonder whether he had been insulted or complimented.
"We're not done yet, Monte Cristo." Flavio was once again squashed into fetal position, and Mad adjusted her old lady glasses. "Remo Di Luca."
"Yes."
"Get a spine before I shove one up your ass. Inder… Inderpreet Singh." There was a muffled noise from the guy with the duct tape. "Should'a known. That means you're Lala-something."
"Dazuluka Tshabalala. You can call me Luka."
"I'll call you Lala. That's everyone! Welcome to Doctor class." Mad put her glasses back in her shirt and produced a lighter from a pocket in her trousers. Once the name list had caught fire properly, she tossed it on the gravel to be completely consumed by the flame. "Question one: who's that?" She pointed at Gianpiero as if he were a stowaway found on her private yacht.
"Elvis Presley", he deadpanned.
"Yeah? Sure look like a Hound Dog to me." Mad's grin promised the stowaway he would be delivered to the ship chef as main course. "S'that what you are? The Count's little bed boy?"
Shiro was in no way an expert on Elvis songs, but between Mad's taunting and the stiff look on Gianpiero's face he didn't need to.
"I'm Gianpiero Sacchetti." The name rolled off his tongue like a court sentence, with a weight and solemnity completely out of place for him. Mad whistled, and the look on her face was that of a dog who has found a new favourite toy. To chew to pieces.
"I thought you were the Count – looking more aristocratic than this one." She bumped Flavio with the heel of her boot. "Good thing I took both of ya. Tell me, Marquess Hound Dog – how much will mom and dad pay to get you back?"
"Less than you'd have to pay them to stay employed by the Order."
Mad threw her head back with a gleeful, uncouth laugh. "And the lord chased the merchants from the temple and invited the robbers in! Feel free to join class whenever you want, Marquess: your boyfriend will be waiting for you." She rose, and landed a light kick in Flavio's butt to let him know he was now allowed to uncurl. "Question two: why are you all in those body bags?"
"What a coincidence: we'd like to know that, too", Larry drawled.
Mad swept her eyes over the bunch with a thoroughly unimpressed look. "He can't tell his face from his ass and you let him speak for you…? I'll give you a hint: you're in body bags because I put you in them", she informed with her kindest smile, or at least she tried. "Then I left you in them."
That was all she said, as if she expected one of them to continue the explanation – which, to be perfectly frank, was fucking ludicrous. Like this class in general.
"Ya know what, if you're too stupid to figure this one out there's a restaurant down in Testaccio that's looking for washers. You'll get your own apron and everything. They can help you tie it, too."
With that said, Mad sat herself down on the grass, legs crossed, whipped out a flute – that coincidentally was an iron pipe with crudely drilled holes and a mouthpiece – and started playing the most ear-gratingly cheerful tune ever composed. According to Andrew, it was called Yakety sax and came from a British TV show.
As the mood in the group wasn't the best, and the music didn't make it better, the first minute or so consisted mostly of growling and complaining and some colourful suggestions of what Mad could do with that flute. Then Gianpiero, whose mind seemed to run on a different track as usual, had a brainwave.
"It's like a party game. Lie down, Flavio, lie down – no, on your back." Gianpiero rolled and wiggled himself over to him. "You know, the game where you have to transfer an orange from person to person but you're only allowed to grip it between your chin and chest? Like that, but we do it like this."
At first it looked like he was about to lean down and kiss Flavio on the lips; next moment he had clamped the zipper tab between his teeth and was pulling the body bag open. It required a lot of position-changing and almost toppling face-first into Flavio's belly, and it looked damn silly – especially with that background music – but it did work. Soon they were all engaged in chortling into each others throats and chests and, as zippers were worked further down, in making suggestive comments about using less teeth and more tongue. Which only brought out the memory of a very long, very nimble tongue doing things Shiro did not want to think about. Was not thinking about. Was not trying to distract himself from by glancing in every direction that did not offer the sight of a mock-blowjob. His eyes landed on Luka, whose face constituted a stoic island amongst the waves of jokes and laughs. She declined any help until they had someone completely out of the body bag who could use his hands.
"Finally." Where there had been eight malformed mermaids there were now eight uniformed exorcists, and Mad had stuffed her flute into a trouser pocket that was either space-bent or ran as deep as her knee. She stood up and cracked her neck. "So, on to today's practical lesson: getting out of cable ties. This is assuming someone is actually dumb enough to strap your hands in front of your body but evidently human stupidity is alive and well."
She showed them how to use their teeth to align the joint of the cable tie between their wrists, and then to spread their elbows so that they could pass on the outsides of their hips. Then it was only a matter of raising your arms and bringing them downwards and backwards, elbows passing on the outside of your body, with enough force to snap the cable tie.
"Good", she said once they were all free and head-bun guy had peeled off his improvised gag. "Marquess Hound Dog can go – the rest of you have an exam to write. You all got bits and pieces of Doctor with your Page and Esquire training: I need to know what you learnt and what you didn't."
"Elvis has left the building." Gianpiero waved lazily over his shoulder as he headed off down the gravel path.
"Long live the king", Mad responded. "Oh, yeah, I should probably set your pinky right, shouldn't I? Gather 'round, little ducklings, and I'll show you how to deal with dislocated joints. What's the name of this one?" Larry grudgingly let her take his wrist and point at his knuckle. "Anyone?"
"The metacarpophalangeal joint", Luka answered.
"So it is. And what type of joint is that?"
"Condylar joint", Shiro said, the taste of long hours of swotting human anatomy coming back to him.
"Correct. Which means it moves on two axes – up, down, and side to side – and we won't really know whether it's dislocated or not based on movement alone. Now the good thing with joints is that you always have more than one of them, so if you're ever unsure if it's injured or not you can compare with its twin. So tell me: in what way does this pinky look different?"
Mad showed them how to palpate the injury, how to set the bones, and the finer points of buddy taping an injured finger to its neighbour for support. Larry would be fit as a fiddle in three weeks, she assured, then proceeded to check over their other injuries and describe the do's and don't's of treating them.
"So, I found this little darling on our future Paladin." Ah. So that's where it went. Shiro's knife flicked open in Mad's hand like a natural extension of her arm. She weighed it in her palm, tested it with a few well practiced swings and stabs. "This is about as useful against demons as nail clippers against bears – no, this is stuff you use on humans." Shiro hoped nobody else saw the dark leer Mad shot him. "Was gonna show you how to deal with cut wounds but it seems we haven't got any to demonstrate on. Maybe next time." She folded the blade back into the handle and tossed the knife to its owner.
Shiro caught it on pure reflex, his mind completely detached from the body. Next time? What was that supposed to mean? She expected him to wound someone? Unbidden, memories dried his mouth and flooded his heart, compressing his chest with a slow, merciless fist.
She knew about Samael's prediction of a future Paladin. What else did she…?
The world carried on. It always did. Had to move with it: had to seem like his mind was not ten thousand miles away and hundreds of metres below ground in a sealed chamber. Sluggishly, Shiro went with the flow and fell in line as Mad began handing out their exams from her van.
"When you gathered us up this morning: was that also a test?" Luka asked when she received paper and pen.
"Everything is a test and we never get the correct answers", she responded curtly.
"I don't think that answers–"
"Are you deaf or stupid?" Mad cut off. There was an odd sort of pause, the kind where the vase teeters on the edge of the table and contemplates which way it will tip. Half a second later Mad's lip was bleeding and Luka was on the ground with one arm locked behind her back. "Stupid, then. If you're attacking someone you go for back-stabs or ambushes, not full frontal assaults."
"Unless you outnumber the enemy." Shiro underlined his statement with a well-deserved kick to Mad's ribs. Sometimes that just seems like the best course of action, even if the person at the receiving end is your boss. Or because they are your boss.
What happened after that was deeply satisfying: messy, but satisfying. It was Luka, Shiro, and Larry against Mad at first, which was great odds even with Mad's iron pipe flute being very painful to deal with. Andrew was next to join the fray, but as he tended to be counter-productive to anything he set himself to, he wasn't there to help: he dragged Larry out of the fight. Remo, who possessed a similar over-abundance of morals, locked his arms around Shiro and pleaded him to please not fight even if Mad seemed to want them to do precisely that.
It was down to Luka and Mad, the former keeping a wary distance from their teacher as she weighed her next move. Mad, on the other hand, seemed to consider the fight over. She relaxed her pose and slipped the flute back into her shorts pocket with a most pleased look on her face.
"Good!" She clapped her hands appreciatively, then snaked one hand down to gingerly test ribs that, as far as Shiro could estimate, must be either broken or severely bruised by now. "Real good! I might be able to make decent cannon fodder outta ya' still! Except those two." The only ones who hadn't in some way participated in the fight were Flavio and Inder… head-bun guy. "They're only good for drinking coffee at the Round Table."
If the practical assessments Mad had conducted were confusing, the written test was no better. Being able to do chemical calculations was a given; the questions about common poisons and the remedies to counter them were also straightforward. But every now and then she had thrown in questions that did not, no matter how Shiro thought about it, make sense with the subject. "Do you have any immune suppressive illness?", "Describe the consistency of your feces, and how many times a day you take a dump", "How often do you eat grapefruit?" You didn't just write your name on the front page either, as on a regular test: you were asked to disclose name, height, weight, blood type, and age.
You would have thought the confusion would be over after class. Well, it wasn't.
"Alex! My guy, my man – what's this talk about being the next Paladin?" Flavio draped his arm across Shiro's shoulders. The group of Doctors-to-be was heading towards St Peter's Cathedral and the exit of the Papal Gardens, and they had a lot to talk about. "Is that why you transferred to HQ? Paladin Beaumonde wants to oversee the progress of his protégé?"
"I wish." No, he really didn't. His mission here was risky as it was. "I had a bit of a reputation back home: the only Page to study all five Meisters at once. People just assumed I had an ambition to become Paladin." Shiro didn't need to use any decoy questions to steer clear of the topic: there were a bunch of things he genuinely wanted answers to. "But hey: Count? You're an actual Count?"
"Well technically my father is the Count, but I'll inherit the title eventually, so", he waved his hand casually, "same difference."
"So what does that mean, here in Europe? You get to wear a crown and give advice to the king?" Larry asked, pressing Remo's handkerchief to his injured temple. Remo himself had joined the vanguard, consisting of Luka and head bun, who were chatting amicably five metres or so ahead of them.
"I get my own fealty lands and a harem of college girls. No, there's nothing like that – Italy has been a republic since the last World War", Flavio enlightened, "but Capponi is a big name in politics. It's the usual: we own land and a couple of palazzos that we pay basically no tax on, but in return we're obliged to honour their historical value. Keep them in good condition and such. The one in Florence is your typical Renaissance palace, while…"
Anyone who could say they owned a couple of palaces and make it sound like they were talking about teapots was, in Shiro's mind, not qualified to own any palaces at all. Or private harbours. Or any of the other things Flavio listed like they were something you found in every man's home. When he and Andrew started bonding over how many gardeners they each had to hire to tend their vast estates, it was simply too much.
"And how many palaces does G own?" Shiro asked with that thin, polite coating of poison he had learnt from a certain demon. Andrew would miss it completely but Flavio was, as Mad had put it, less inbred. Remo might notice it, too: he had bid Luka and head bun a good day and waited for their clique to catch up.
"Three", he responded with an amused glint in his eyes. "Two in Florence, one in Rome."
"The House of Sacchetti has served the Pope for generations: it's one of the oldest noble families in all of Europe", Andrew filled in and looked disturbingly much like Samael when he got worked up about anime collectibles. "The current Quartermaster General of the Vatican is our dear Gianpiero's father, if memory doesn't fail me."
"It doesn't", Remo confirmed. "I'm impressed that you know such details of Italian history – I really couldn't say the same of my knowledge of Britain." A soft smile touched his face. "But your family is part of the Black Aristocracy, too, or no?"
"You humble yourself, my friend!" Andrew patted Remo's shoulder with enthusiasm. "Clearly you do know something of British history. Indeed, my great-great-grandfather, Archibald Angel, was honoured with membership in–"
"You know, Black Aristocracy sounded like a circle of mob kingpins until your ancestors joined", Larry mused. "Now I'm picturing it as a club for Brits who like their Earl Grey so strong it's practically black. Real hardcore Brits, you don't wanna mess with those. They'll call you snodgy-scuttlers and shimmy-jeeblers and sprinkle pepper on your biscuits."
Shiro had no idea what Larry had just said. Neither did Andrew, but he was profoundly impressed that Larry was more well versed in British expressions than he was. While Shiro suspected Larry was more well versed in Bullshit than British, no one saw any reason to inform Andrew of that.
"No but seriously, guys, what's the Black Aristocracy?"
"It's the innermost circle of the Vatican's core of power", Flavio explained. "A royal court, if you will, with the Pope at its centre. Mostly it's Italian noble families, but occasionally there have been Popes who made exceptions for distinguished nobles from abroad." He nodded at Andrew. "The influence of those families extends to every part of the Vatican, including the exorcists. That's a fun look on your face, Alex", he snorted and wiggled his eyebrows. "You really are a Communist, aren't you?"
"Uh…" Shiro had been thinking of the aristocratic families in the Japanese Branch – of Yaonaru, and all the trouble they had caused him. Nobles and their obsession with pedigree and power. "Just spacing out. Come on, it's not every day you learn that all your teammates", he swept a hand over Andrew, Flavio, and mentally over Gianpiero, "are from the crustiest upper crust of the Order."
"Oh, not him. The House of Capponi are regular nobles, not part of the inner circle of the Vatican", Andrew corrected helpfully – depending on who you asked. Flavio didn't seem to think it was helpful at all.
It's funny how some words strike a chord with you. Not part of, not included in: those invisible walls the world shoves in between you and others till they're so thick you couldn't be heard outside even if you screamed.
What's also funny is how some people can think it's an issue to be born with a silver spoon in their mouth and not a golden one.
"So it's Andy and G-man we have to blame for the nutjob teacher, not you."
"Oh I'm going to look into that. If there's any way to get that harpy fired, I'll make it happen", Flavio assured with seething determination.
"Who the hell is she, anyway?" Larry asked.
"The Vatican's elite forces." Flavio rolled his eyes as if that was common knowledge. "You heard her. She's from Section XIII, which is like the Swiss Guard but with exorcists. You just don't see them as much. They don't take part in processions and they don't have enough people to play in the Vatican Championship."
"Play in what?"
"The Vatican Championship." The change of subject lit Flavio's eyes with enthusiasm. "The world's smallest football league in the world's smallest state – you'll love it. Each of the work forces in the Vatican has its own team, see, so every spring – well ideally every spring, but they don't always hold the games – you've got the museum guards, the Swiss Guards, the newspaper, the radio station, the exorcists, and the Vatican police competing for the title. It's immensely popular; I've been nagging G about joining our team now that he's living in Rome but he keeps saying 'later'", Flavio swung his arms out, "while we get bested by goddamn typographists!"
Head bun – Inderpreet – was just as upset about this. Possibly. While Luka had continued ahead with determined strides, he had followed Remo's example and waited for them to catch up. Once they had he began talking cheerfully about something absolutely unintelligible that made Italian seem like the native language of snails. A series of crinkled brows and sideways glances followed, but the only thing anyone could really make out was that much of Inderpreet's typewriter chatter was directed at Shiro.
"Sorry, I don't understand."
No, and neither did Inderpreet. He kept prattling happily about something and wasn't bothered in the least by Shiro's increasingly lost look.
"Look, I don't speak… whatever you speak right now. Can you do Italian…?"
There is a special type of frustration that occurs when there's nothing you can do about the situation and the situation keeps pushing you around, like Gino in search of a treat in your pocket.
"What's that? I can't inderpreet what you say", Flavio snickered, and had the others snorting little laughs as well.
"Good one. Just don't turn into Battista."
"That's the one thing I don't plan on learning from Battista. Alright, gentlemen, I'm gonna go find G and see what kind of strings we can pull here – I'll see you when I see you."
The rest split up at the Square: Larry to find an ice pack and Remo to attend a friend's birthday; Andrew planned to visit some museum, and Inderpreet…
"Why do you follow me? Do you live in this direction too?"
Shiro caught a flotsam 'no' in the rapid current of Inderpreet's speech. So he was listening, and he spoke at least basic Italian. Something to build on.
"Where are you from?"
…it sounded like "chibi". He couldn't possibly have responded "chibi", but that was all Shiro understood – even when he asked Inderpreet again. He was from a small country…? One thing became increasingly clear the more Shiro strained his ears to make out what the guy said: Inderpreet was, in fact, speaking Italian. He just spoke so fast the half-pronounced words merged.
"Hey, look: stop." Shiro stopped square on the sidewalk, held both hands up before him and stopped Inderpreet as well. "Speak slower. I can't hear a thing you say."
"Okay!" he said, and it was finally intelligi– "Are you albino?"
"…what?"
Inderpreet scrunched his eyebrows together and, with physical effort, repeated himself: "Aaare yooouuu aaaalbiii–"
"I heard, I heard – and no, I'm not. I just age and grey fast. Whoa slow down! …if I eat foods rich in copper? Dude I don't even know what foods contain copper." This turned into a cue for Inderpreet to start listing foods that did. That would probably have been useful if he had explained what the copper was for. "Fine, good, excellent", Shiro interrupted, just throwing a question out there to stop him before he geared up again: "What's that thing on your head?"
"A patka!"
"A what?"
"I'm sick", Inderpreet explained with a happy face. "I wear this to keep my hair in place."
Keep his hair in place… because it was falling out…? Or because it was growing abnormally fast…? Was that why he was so keen on asking questions about health and sickness…? Shiro was puzzled. He kept being puzzled the rest of the walk until he straight up told Inderpreet to buzz off and leave him alone. It saved his ears but it made him even more confused: Inderpreet didn't seem the least offended by his dismissal, just smiled and waved goodbye. Really: weird-ass people were the only ones who'd get the idea to become exorcists.
A/N
Guillotine choke is a martial arts grip where you block the blood flow to the brain by locking and squeezing the neck with arms or legs. Done correctly, the opponent will pass out in ~4 seconds. (Please note that the grip Shura and Shiro pull on Rin isn't a choke grip but a headlock.) Also, on the topic of martial arts, my awesome beta reader told me that it's harder to grip/lock/disarm a drummer because they have such strong wrists. (So Mad opted for a different tactic.)
Cable ties
I don't know how likely it is that you ever find yourself bound with cable ties and hands in front? But if you do this is apparently a tested way to snap them.
British nobility, Italian nobility, and Vatican nobility
There is a Capponi family carrying the title Count, and there is a Sacchetti family of Marquesses that held the office of Quartermaster General at the Vatican when that position still existed. Marquess outranks Count. (I was somewhat puzzled over the titles first, but some googling clarified that Earl is the proper name for a Count, but only in Britain; in Italy a Count is a Count.) As for the Black Aristocracy, it exists, too. It's an old group of nobles that held high-ranking positions in the Vatican state, many times also becoming Popes. The name Black Aristocracy originated between 1870 and 1929, when Pope Pius IX refused to leave Vatican City: the Papal States had been conquered by the Kingdom of Italy, but the Pope refused to accept it. As the Pope locked himself in, a number of noble families tied to the Vatican showed their support by keeping the doors of their estates in Rome locked. The Black in the moniker comes from the black clothes of the clergy, as this clique is "a nobility in the service of the representative of God". (Many of the positions and privileges of the Black Nobility were abolished in the 1960s but shhh that just goes for the official Vatican, not the underground exorcist Vatican…;3)
Flute is a legit weapon in both kung fu and taekwondo, okay? If it's made of steel on top of that, you're looking at a real badass stealth weapon. (Insert suitable joke about the Bard class here.)
Campionato Vaticano di Calcio, the Vatican Championship, has been around since 1973. It's just as Flavio says, with the employees of the Vatican forming their respective teams – and yes, the newspaper team has beaten the Swiss Guard at football. (My mind will forever remember the referee line "scored by three unstoppable typographists" because that mental image is simply beautiful.) There is also an inter-university league where the seminarians and priests of the city compete: Clericus Cup. But that came about much later.
Hound Dog is associated with Elvis but the original singer was Big Mama Thorntorn. The song is basically about a woman tossing a selfish gigolo out of her life: Gianpiero is aware that he has just received a second degree burn.
Sometimes Katou and I wind up having the same ideas. ._. It makes me a bit hiccupy because then it looks like I'm just recycling her characters/plot devices with new names slapped on them, and that was never the intention.
Section XIII and Section 13
I hope that's enough to differentiate them… =0w0'= Section XIII was a combat unit I invented years ago when I asked optimustaud if I could borrow some of their characters. It's more of a Hellsing reference, really. (Will be getting back to that.) Now of course I'll have to include the canonical Section 13 in the fic also…
Johanna "Mad" Stridsberg existed in my head long before Lightning made his debut in the manga. The epic nutcase teacher trope isn't that unusual, but still… The man Mad is based on was similar to Lightning in many ways: a self-educated, trash hoarding loner with an unhealthy fascination for dangerous things and a complicated relation to humans. He died from cancer a few years ago, but I'd like to imagine that he would have appreciated this. I'll occasionally take the opportunity to tell an anecdote from his life: good stories should never die. For the story behind this introduction to Doctor class, see the headline below. The name Stridsberg is borrowed from a maths teacher at my high school. It translates "Battlemountain" because Swedes have badass surnames. You can be named Oakenshield and Greenleaf, too – or Dragonhammer, Meadowstream, Firemoon, and Frostbane. (In fact Sweden is an entirely fictional country.)
Real-life Mad: The anecdote the Swedish army wants to forget
This introduction to Doctor class is based on a particular event from his youth (this might actually have been around the current time in the fic).
Once upon a time there was a small island in Öresund, the strait between Sweden and Denmark. The island was called Ven, and on it lived a man we will call J. It so happened that J had some friends over to share a beer (and perhaps stronger things) at the same time as the Swedish army was holding an exercise on the Ven base. J disliked the army quite a bit (the Swedish army was a joke, he'd say) and as glasses were emptied and refilled the men riled each other up more and more, until they marched off to the military compound to let the soldiers know their opinion (it seemed like a good idea then).
Now, rattling the shrubs around the compound didn't catch the soldiers' attention. Neither did rattling the fence, or shouting. Most of the young men lost interest in the initiative then, and trotted back home. J trotted along with them, but the lack of attention from the soldiers had only served to make him more determined to teach them a lesson: as a Swede would say, "the Devil had flown into him". J returned to the military exercise area with a bolt cutter and made short work of the fence.
Inside the area, he scouted the closest watch tower and snuck to pose himself between the tower and one of the floodlights on the ground. Once there, with his impressive stature made even more impressive by the light (as well as his features obscured by it), he shouted at the lookout (with all the authority of a commander) to come down. The soldier did, and was readily disarmed and rendered immobile with cable ties (which was one of the things J always kept handy in one of his many coat pockets).
Now armed with a rifle, J proceeded to work his way around the area until he had captured the entire company. Alone. And drunk. Once he had accomplished this, he gave his captives a most passionate speech of how incompetent the Swedish army was, discarded the rifle, and prepared to leave.
He didn't get to leave, as, during his guerrilla assault, somebody had alerted the army officials on the mainland. More soldiers arrived by helicopter, and J was captured and jailed.
The time in jail did little to change J. Years later he was asked to supervise a military exercise in Denmark, where the Blue Berets (UN peacekeeping troops) would train. This was not, of course, because of J's own reputation with the army, but because of the respected rank his father had held. Now, there was no way in hell J would refuse that offer. A Blue Beret would make a most splendid trophy above his mantelpiece, and so he agreed to supervise. He was informed that he would not be allowed to bring weapons to the exercise, and so he didn't. He brought with him a length of rope, and brought back a bundled-up UN soldier slung over his shoulders. The UN supervisors were suitably flabbergasted, until the similarities with that story from Ven was brought up and somebody called to mind that the madman from then was also named J, and that there simply couldn't be two of them.
You won't find these stories recorded anywhere unless you happen to have a collection of cutouts from Swedish magazines from 40-50 years ago. It was long before Internet, and the UN as well as the Swedish army have a reputation to maintain. Being humiliated by one Swedish lunatic armed with ropes and cable ties was something they didn't like talking about.