A/N: Yes, I know Itori isn't canonically the bartender at the Helter Skelter, but for the sake of convenience can we just imagine she is? She's not really a part of this story anyway. Oh yeah, and I promise there will be more Juuzou in chapter 3. Anyway, to the 9 of you who will read this, I hope you enjoy, and please leave a review! :v

I

Section Chief Misaki Kirihara tried to keep her breathing steady as she aggressively avoided eye contact with any of the Helter Skelter's patrons. The bar wasn't the most reputable of places, of this much Misaki had already been aware, but it was still something of a shock to her as she observed the occasional shady character mooching into the establishment from the wall against which she was leant, she hoped, rather casually.

She felt uncomfortably exposed. Out in the open with nothing visible to distinguish her as a member of authority, anything could happen. Misaki swallowed any fear that threatened to rise in her throat, however; this was, after all, her job.

"Yeah, I'll see you later." The door just to her right swung open, and instantly she could feel the warmth on her face, could hear the hushed chatter and occasional shout from inside, could smell the distinctive smell of stale beer and stronger, more potent alcoholic concoctions.

Misaki took a deep breath. The man leaving the Helter Skelter bar was, she knew, the man she was after- a man named Hiromasa Aihara, born in Tokyo, thirty-two years old, suspected of involvements of indeterminate nature with the notoriously shadowy Syndicate, possibly a contractor, definitely dangerous.

"Excuse me, sir." Misaki smiled briefly at the man in what she hoped was a convincingly anxious manner. "I'm really sorry, but do you know where this is?" she asked, showing him a small piece of paper with an address on it.

"Yeah, uh, that's actually on the way back to my place. I could show you the way, if you want?" he offered, exactly as Misaki had intended.

"That would be great! I mean, if you're sure it's no trouble."

"Of course not."

She didn't like the way he was looking at her.

Black rain glanced off of the road. Lights like cigarette burns in the dark blistered across the entirety of the city; cars writhed around hotly, never seeming to stop.

The air was thin, almost unbreathable, as Hei stole his way through the night. He was unfamiliar with the 14th ward- moreover, he was unfamiliar with its alleyways and side streets- but he had in his mind the general image of the layout he'd laboriously studied earlier. There was no way the Black Reaper was carrying around a map.

The streets were empty, almost unnervingly so. Hei had caught sight of hardly a single person so far; there was the eerie sense, however, that he wasn't actually alone. Buildings on either side of him loomed, and it felt as if people were hiding silently in their shadows, urgent whispers fading before they could be heard.

His objective had been to observe the target, to follow him, to find out more about him: where he lived, if he stopped to speak to anyone on his way home, that sort of thing. Yin had been sat at the tobacco shop with her feet dipped in a bowl of water all day watching the man's activities as he'd been working, and had confirmed that he had the memory stick containing the Syndicate documents on him; obviously he must've been concerned about leaving it at home unsupervised, for fear of it being stolen.

It became clear to Hei, however, that he'd have to pursue another course of action.

Misaki Kirihara. Section Chief of Foreign Affairs Section Four.

"Damn it," he hissed to himself as he ducked back around the corner he'd just come from, blending back into the shadows before he could be recognized.

He had no choice but to follow them.

Chief Kirihara investigating the same man Hei was after suddenly made things all too sticky, but he had navigated sticky situations involving Misaki before- he wasn't too concerned about her finding out his true identity. He was, however, concerned about the very real possibility of Section Four getting their hands on whatever that classified Syndicate information happened to be; it was for this reason that he set about shadowing them at a distance.

As Hei watched them he wondered what Kirihara was planning to do, trying to come up with plausible scenarios, and the resulting actions he would take regarding each one. He knew that there was a chance that he wasn't the only one observing the pair, and that he was potentially in a very difficult situation.

It seemed to Misaki that, somehow, the roads were getting narrower the further they walked. After every corner they turned around, everything would seem a little closer, a little darker, a little more unsettling. She also had the uncomfortable sensation that she was being watched. Well, she was- Saitou and co. hopefully weren't far off, keeping track of everything that was going on as best they could- but that didn't help to ease the nervous chills beginning to creep up her spine.

"So, you looking for someone at that address or what?" the suspect, Aihara, asked casually as they walked. His hand ever so slightly brushed against hers; Misaki began to feel mildly nauseous.

"Just visiting a friend," she replied lightly, sweat beading on her forehead. "She recently moved, and I wasn't sure how to get to the new address."

"Oh. You close, or…?"

"Yes," she lied quickly, "I know her pretty well."

Aihara smiled sickeningly. "Well, that's a shame."

Misaki's blood ran cold. "Th-that's a shame?" she echoed, her voice faltering just a little. "Yeah, it's a shame," he replied apathetically, steering her off into some narrow street, cast in shadow and lined with tall, uniform buildings. "It's a damn shame that you're not going to be able to see your little friend now." He grinned widely.

"Did you just threaten me?" she began to ask coldly. She was cut off, however, at the sight of the inhuman tentacles that began to writhe from the man's back.

What is he? Misaki thought to herself, too stricken with horror to move. Before she could act, before she could even think, one of the appendages had snaked its way around her forearm, another round her waist, and she screamed.

The man's face was cast dramatically in shadow, but his gruesome silhouette was clear to Hei from his position a few paces behind. What he was seeing was no mistake. The detached part of Hei's personality absently wondered of this was some kind of contractor he'd never seen before; there was another part of him, though, that was screaming at him to get to Kirihara, to save her before this monster could kill her.

Though it pained him somewhat, Hei kept himself from acting impulsively. He lingered in the darkness, hidden, watching silently.

Misaki's throat was raw, and she was panicking. Desperately she attempted to take control of her thoughts, to take control of her body, paralyzed with fear and restrained though it was.

Aihara pulled her towards him and inhaled deeply, his eyelids fluttering and his stomach-churning smile twisting menacingly as he took in her scent.

"There, now," he hissed. "Don't scream. It'll all be over in just a minute."

As she struggled to coordinate her body, Misaki wondered what about that statement was meant to encourage her not to scream. Aihara leaned into her neck, and, to her absolute horror, slowly licked her from her collarbone to her jawline. She screamed again, thrashing against the choking grip of the meaty red tendrils that had now began to wrap around her neck, restricting her breathing, crushing her windpipe.

Aihara leant into her once more.

And took a bite clean out of her shoulder.

The pain seared through her entire body. Her scream was silent; she struggled to breathe as the blood surged from the bite. A rush of adrenaline wracked her entire form, and she struggled relentlessly against his hold; another bite, however, this one from further up her neck, and she slackened against him, drained.

Hei tensed up, unable to comprehend what exactly he was seeing. He was about to intervene- running headfirst into dangerous situations was, of course, his specialty- when someone else appeared to beat him to it.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" growled a voice from behind the ghoul. Aihara spun round to face whoever it was, dropping Misaki heavily to the ground as he did so. As she hit the floor with a hideous thud, she tried to reach for her phone to contact Saitou, but found her limbs were unresponsive- she was all but dead weight.

"This is my feeding ground," she heard the man snarl; from where she was sprawled on the ground, she couldn't see what was going on, but she could hear every last crunch as the two began to fight.

The intruder thrust Aihara up against a nearby wall by the throat, tightening his grip as the other ghoul began to choke on his own blood. Before Aihara could even fight back, he was viciously speared on the interrupters kagune, his entire torso rupturing forcefully outwards in a viscid crimson soup; he slumped to the ground, spent, and his killer spat viciously on his corpse.

The ghoul turned slowly to Misaki. "I'm not going to kill you." Somehow he made it sound like an insult. "I'd rather die than finish that sack of shit's leftovers."

Misaki could barely comprehend what she was hearing; looming unconsciousness was washing over her in waves at that point. Just as she was on the verge of blacking out completely, she heard someone walking towards her. She lifted her head- which seemed to weigh a ton- as much as she could; when she recognized the figure standing over her, she gasped.

BK-201.

Then, nothing.

Hei skulked towards Kirihara carefully. He had no idea what he'd just seen (or heard; feeding ground?), but he- for whatever reason- couldn't let her die.

He lifted her mobile phone from her trouser pocket delicately, touching as little of her inert body as he could, and took a picture of the scene before him- Kirihara's near lifeless form, and the layout of the alley they were in (including the very clear sign just to the right of her that readstated the name of the road) - and sent it to the first number in her emergency contacts: Saitou.

As he quietly departed from the scene, he tried not to feel guilty; he had faith that Misaki Kirihara's most trusted subordinate would find her in time. He took off running across a nearby rooftop, all the while taking care not to glance behind him.

II

"Just the regular please, love," a short, muscular man with greasy hair that seemed almost red in the bar's asphyxiatingly warm light said, catching the attention of the scantily-clad female bartender.

The man leaned in towards her, nodding his head towards Hei, who had been idly polishing the inside of a glass with a grubby white cloth a few feet away. "Who's the new kid?" the man asked, raising his eyebrows in Hei's direction.

Hei- Li- pretended not to listen as he placed his glass down gently on the side. Considering it was only his second day working there, a lot of people had asked about him, and everyone- bar staff included- had been treating him oddly the entire time: either they avoided him entirely, faces twisted in mix of confusion and what could only be called disgust, or they hovered incessantly around him, asking after him constantly, but never directly to him, never to his face.

Naturally, Hei had, at first, been under the impression that they all somehow knew that he was a Contractor, but surely that couldn't be it. That would've been impossible. Just a fraction of Tokyo's population knew of the existence of Contractors, and most of those were government officials; there was no way all of them just happened to frequent the very bar Hei worked part-time at.

Of course, the only reason he'd began working there was because his previous target had been viciously murdered, meaning Hei had no idea where the Syndicate documents were. The best course of action had been to figure out who the defector had given the memory stick to, since as far as any of Hei's team could tell, he had to have given it to somebody at his workplace. Since, however, all of the staff had been avoiding him quite pointedly, this was more difficult than Hei had expected it to be.

"Oh, just some kid we took on yesterday. An exchange student, apparently," the glittery-eyed, orange-haired bartender replied with a quirk of the lips.

"An exchange student, eh?" The man leant in even further. "So why'd you hire him, Itori? What's really going on?"

Itori smiled furtively. "He came here asking for work. How could I refuse?"

Hei frowned. His suspicions were growing into something similar, perhaps, on a conceptual level at least, to fear. Trying his best to avoid eye contact with the people discussing him, he glanced through the door to the'staff only' area, and…

Shit. There it is.

Hei made an almost unnoticeable noise as he registered the memory stick just lying there next to one of the bar staff's coats. He didn't know whose coat it was, and at this point he didn't particularly care; he just wanted to get his hands on the thing and get out of there before he had to deal with anybody else enquire after his circumstances without acknowledging his presence.

Hei busied himself with another glass as the bartender turned around to pour the man's drink.

Later that evening, Hei was approached by the owner of the coat; he only knew the man who approached him was the owner of the coat because, with no small amount of suspicion, Hei had agreed to accompany the man outside into the dim, stifling night for a 'quick word', and had witnessed the man shrugging on the coat in a somewhat paranoid manner. Hei had also taken care to notice that the man had, after a quick glance to both his left and right, slipped the memory stick into his inside jacket pocket. Clearly this was the only reason he'd worn the coat (to keep this most coveted of contraband close), since it was strangely hot outside for that time of day, and, moreover, for that time of year; it was October, and yet the air itself seemed to be dripping with heat, the kind of moist evening heat that only seems to follow the coldest of days.

"You knew him, didn't you?"

Hei looked at the man coldly. "Who?"

The man shook his head. "You know who. He goes and gets himself murdered and a couple days later some stranger, some outsider, turns up sniffing round his corpse- an immigrant, no less- and y…"

"Exchange student," Hei muttered, his gaze getting colder by a few degrees.

"What?" The man stared. "Look, I know what your deal is. I know about you. Which is more than you can say," he continued, ignoring Hei's interjection, "about us."

Now it was Hei's turn to stare. "Who are you?"
The man carried on, ignoring Hei once again. "You're just after this, aren't you?" he accused, producing the memory stick from his pocket.

"Who are you?" Hei repeated. He was on edge; his absolute lack of control over this conversation was making him uncomfortable, but he continued to stare the other man down solidly.

It was silent for a few long seconds, and tension began to ferment in the empty space left by the lack of words.

Then, from back inside the bar, a jeer went up- something to do with sports, no doubt- and the moment fractured. The other man seemed to drop his guard almost imperceptibly, and his eyes, cast into light shadow by a brow lightly dusted with droplets of nervous perspiration, fell to the concrete at Hei's feet.

"Look, just take it," he said, thrusting it at Hei. "B-but don't give it to them. I can tell... that you don't want to, that you don't trust them. You shouldn't, anyway."

Hei, having caught the item in one hand without tearing his eyes away from the other man for even a fraction of a second, inspected it, before putting into his pocket and looking back at the man through his eyelashes.

"Who are you?" he asked again, quietly this time, like the question held a new meaning somehow.

"Me? I'm just a ghoul."