*Scandal AU! I've written inspired by Scandal with these two before, but this one the roles are reversed with Yato as Fits and Bisha as Olivia.
Bishamon opened her door and came face to face with Yato leaning in her doorway, hands braced against either side of the door frame. When the door swung open he looked up to meet her eyes. She crossed her arms, shoulders falling as she sighed through her nose. Neither spoke.
Yato let his arms fall and took a step forward. Bishamon stepped to the side to allow him in. Wordlessly Yato walked into her apartment, and wordlessly Bishamon closed the door behind him, the latch clicking was the only sound in the tense silence. He stopped in front of her couch and faced her, bracing for the words he knew she would say.
"Are you here to answer my question? About what you were doing during Operation Remmington?"
"No." Yato said simply. "You could come on the campaign trail, we could… try to be us again."
The affront Bishamon felt was so immediate and so strong that her heart didn't even beat it's familiar out of rhythm dance when he looked at her with a face full of mournful longing. He didn't even know what he'd done, he had no idea why she was so insistent on getting answers. He wouldn't have dismissed her question so easily if he'd known.
She wasn't sure if that made it worse or better.
Bishamon held herself away from him with righteous fury, holding back all the pain and rage that she'd ever felt with the feeble barrier of her arms crossed over her chest. His inability to grasp the gravity of her anger oozed out of his relaxed posture and the way he said her name with his eyes, not his lips. He clearly didn't notice the veins tightening in her neck.
She looked down, reigning in her emotions- she needed to get herself under control to say what she needed to say, but when she looked back up at his face his stance shifted. He had seen her storm brewing beneath the surface and he was taken aback. Without knowing her newfound personal connection to Operation Remmington he had no idea why she was taking this so seriously.
"You made a mistake coming here," she said, voice barely more than a growl.
She turned away, seething in all the places she wasn't trembling inside. She'd known, of course she'd known about his military history. Everyone knew that Yato had been a fighter pilot in the Navy, that he'd flown black ops missions that earned him a medal of honor, but this. No wonder he'd refused to campaign on his military history. It was all a lie.
"There is nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you," Yato said, the faintest hint of anger sharpening his voice as he pursued her across the room. "Nothing. We learned that the hard way, V, there is nothing that you could do that I wouldn't forgive. Not ever. Why won't you extend me the same courtesy?" He stopped right next to her, inches away, leaning to the side so he could see her face despite her holding herself away from him.
The words prodded her anger, and she could feel her face twitching as she fought off her explosion. "Don't," she said quietly.
"Stop looking," Yato pleaded, matching her tone. Bishamon turned away and strode back across the living room. "Stop digging, it's in the past, just leave it alone."
"No." Bishamon said.
"Why is this so important to you?" Yato asked, throwing his arms wide as he followed her back to where they'd been, face full of pleading for her to let sleeping dogs lie. But she couldn't.
She wouldn't.
The grief and betrayal on her face baffled him, his brows furrowed in mixed concern and confusion as he tried to get at what was bothering her, to understand why she'd pulled away from him when they'd been so close to having what they had both wanted for years, the opportunity to be together. What could make her look at him with such defeated sadness? Why was she suddenly so interested in his classified missions, in Operation Remmington?
"There was a Global World Airlines Plane that went down-" Yato's heart froze, but he forced his face not to react as Bishamon spouted out details that she shouldn't have known. "Three hundred and Twenty-nine people were killed."
He knew, he'd watched the news and cried for them for weeks.
He knew because he'd killed them.
Ten years ago the United States government had received credible intel that there was a massive dirty bomb on Global World Airlines Flight Number 752 from New York to London, timed to go off when the flight was over the heart of London, potentially killing thousands. There had been no way to stop it. The Navy had been faced, then, with a choice, shoot the plane down over the ocean, or let the bomb do what it had been meant to, claiming thousands of lives.
Yato had been chosen to fly the mission.
He still heard the news reports in his dreams.
"Bishamon," Yato said weakly.
"They said it was a mechanical failure, something they could never quite-" her eyes narrowed and her voice took on a deadly calm that he'd rarely seen in her, "-figure out, how a plane could just fall out of the sky. That doesn't happen. That never happens. So they recalled the engine," her mouth twisted into a humorless smile. "But it turns out they didn't need too, because there was nothing wrong with the plane. Because that's the secret. That's what Operation Remmington was. Global World Airlines Flight 752 didn't crash it was shot down. And I think you shot it down. You killed them. You killed all three hundred and twenty-nine of them. They fell into the ocean and they died. So I'll ask you again, where were you during Operation Remmington?"
"Like I said, I don't know what you're talking about," Yato insisted, not bothering to hide the sadness from his face. I'm begging you to let this go, he thought.
Yato braced himself, burning eyes flickering momentarily to the floor as he physically prepared himself to hear her call him a monster as her entire body coiled for the attack, jaw jutting in fury. Whatever point she'd been getting at was on its way now, he knew, but nothing could have prepared him for what she said next.
"Some of those bodies in the ocean were my family, on their way to surprise me at school."
Yato's vision swam as the full scope of the tragedy overtook him. Her family. She'd been so pained by their loss she could still hardly speak of them. And he'd killed them.
He'd ruined her life and stolen her innocence and tore away everything that she loved all in one fell swoop, and he knew, as his own world came crashing down around him that he deserved this, that the devastation he felt now as all his dreams for a life where they were happy together blew apart was nothing compared to how the nineteen-year-old Bishamon must have felt when she'd gotten that call.
"So, do you still not know what I'm talking about?" Her voice was a quiet knife through his heart.
It was over. As he met her gaze with a woefully inadequate poker face he knew he still couldn't admit what he'd done. The mission had been classified, the republic would never survive if they found out that the government had ordered the deaths of three hundred and twenty-nine Americans.
Of her family.
The old, practiced phrase wheezed from his lips with none of the life they'd once had.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Pain, betrayal, disbelief, then something still and horrible settled over her face. Wordlessly she walked past him towards the door. His face crumpled when her back was turned to her and he followed her to the exit, shoulders now weighed down by his sins. He choked back sobs as she opened the door and refused to meet his gaze as he left.
The door snapped shut behind him.