FFOmega

Part II: Crimson Rain

Chapter 3

It had been 3 months since the journey began, and Blaise Zabini was in no mood to talk to anyone as she sat on the steps to a large business complex, cigarette balanced precariously on the filter, sitting on the step next to her, burning slowly. Her eyes were closed, while her hair drifted behind her in the soft wind, her fingernails drumming on the stone steps to a steady rhythm. "You have about another minute before I call in the police. Tell me why you were here!"

The security guard was actually unlike the stereotype, as he stood tall with a bald head and a muscular shape. He had his flashlight trained on the cigarette, which he was using as a timer for how long Blaise had to answer his question. He would look from the cigarette back to observing her body every few seconds. His eyes traveled up her toned legs, which were on full display, hidden very little by the slightly faded red plaid short skirt she wore, but Blaise didn't even seem to notice. She seemed to be staring up at the moonlit sky, not even paying attention as the man seemed to subconsciously inch his hand toward her leg. However, right before he could touch her, her head turned from gazing at the sky and her mahogany eyes locked on him. "He's not going to like that."

"He?" The security guard asked in confusion. "Who is 'he'?" All Blaise did was smirk and point up, and suddenly the cigarette, which was almost burned out, was crushed into the ground as a boot landed right on top of it.

"I think she is talking about me, and she is right, I wouldn't like you touching her." The security guard's eyes darted upwards, and found a pair of shimmering, powerfully bright green eyes watching him. "So move your hand, or lose it."

The security guard didn't have to be asked twice, as he spun around and ran off from the scene. Harry sat down on the step above Blaise and looked at her for a moment. "What's with the outfit?"

"Jumped a girl heading to school, took her clothes. That, and it was laundry day." She replied cheekily. Harry rolled his eyes before he slipped his hand through her hair. She turned around and jumped on him, and they kissed for but a moment. Both heard the sound of someone approaching, and Blaise slipped her hand to the holster on the side of his waist, as his hand went to the holster of the other gun on the other side, and, looking directly into each other's eyes, Blaise turned as Harry pulled the gun his hand was on out, and they both aimed the guns at whoever was behind Blaise.

"Jumpy…good…constant vigilance and such." Harry had not seen the man that stood before him since the end of the previous year, and his sudden appearance unnerved the boy. "Don't ask why we know where you are…Dumbledore has had you under surveillance for some times now. And if you…" But before Moody could get the rest of what he had to say out, Blaise had jumped onto Harry, her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck, and Harry had looked to Moody for a fleeting moment before, with a bit of a crouch and the sound of air being displaced by his leap, they were gone.

-----

Kyoto hated the rain this time of year in his current location for a very specific reason. If the humidity wasn't bad enough, the rain was worse, and the mass amount of water in the air mixed with the heat was screwing with his hair. Frizzy hair was something he did not do and would refuse to deal with any longer than necessary.

Summer in Australia was pushing his mental limits, and the dam was about to break.

He hated Australia.

He hated Australians.

It wasn't so much a hate for the people as a whole, but he had once been born as the child to two criminals left in Australia when it was still a Penal Colony to "Great Britain." He and large quantities of sand, fit about as well as a square peg in a round hole.

The place gave him a migraine, and he had literally let himself be killed if for no other reason than to never have to go back to the continent. And here he was, sitting outside of a bar, dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt and long black pants, the rain pouring down on him.

"Hey there…" He didn't turn to look at her, but pulled out a pocket mirror, much like a female compact, only without the powder inside. It almost looked like it had all been used. He used the mirror to look behind him, catching sight of the woman behind him. Her eyes were bright, her hair matted, and her shirt so soaked to transparency it might as well have not been there. His eyes drank in the sight before he locked eyes with the hunting rifle she held in her hands. She was shaking, and it couldn't have been from cold as it was pushing the triple digits in heat.

He didn't speak, and didn't even turn to look at her, folding the compact-like mirror and placing it into one of the pockets in his pants. She was shaking, he could almost feel it in the ground, but she still worked up the ability to stammer out the same two words she spoke the first time she spoke, only this time, she raised the weapon unsteadily and aimed it at his back. The barrel was truthfully about 5 inches to his left, but for any other person, it would be close enough to at least make a normal human a bit nervous. But Kyoto was notorious for not being a normal person.

Or human.

He turned around slowly, his motions incredibly, almost painfully slow, before flashing her a bright smile. "G'day."

She stared at him before rolling her eyes. "We don't really say that, you know."

"Yes, I know. I lived here once…long ago…" He smiled slightly, before looking at her more directly behind his sunglasses, as was clear by the incline of his head more facing her. "Mind lowering the gun, or do you still want to put a hole say…half a foot to my left." She grinned sardonically before nodding solemnly. She turned the gun so it was really pointing at him.

"Better?"

"Much."

"Interesting. You have 7 seconds to tell me why you are here, and who you are."

"7?"

"Yes."

"Weird number to just pull out of your ass. Why not something exciting like…10. Or if you want to be a boring ass, 3."

"You're at 4 by now."

"I'd roll my eyes, but you wouldn't be able to see it."

"Then take the glasses off, idiot."

"Wouldn't make any difference." He was silent for a moment, before turning all the way to her, and then reaching up to his sunglasses and pulled them off, before peering directly at her. "If I were you, I'd leave. Now. It's not safe for you to be here right now unless you want to die."

"I don't think I'm the one who has to worry about death here, I'm the one with the gun." She spoke after a pause, obviously unnerved by the sight of his eyes.

"I'm serious. Go." He narrowed his eyes at her, before standing and snatching the gun from her trembling hands, and then grabbing her by the back of her shirt and lifting her up and over the bar counter easily, then dropping her there and dropping the rifle down next to her. And as soon as that was done, the door flew open and in walked a huge tower of a man, muscular with a long goatee that was in a braid down to the middle of his stomach. His head was shaved bald beneath the fedora he wore.

"Hmm…I apologize for my tardiness. Now, let's get to this 'death' thing, shall we?" The man spoke in a smooth voice, before pulling out a pair of metal tomahawks.

"Sounds good, and don't worry about the lateness, it let me get a drink in." Kyoto replied. "I'm Kyoto, by the way."

"Nice to meet ya. I'm called Bear."

"Ouch…irony."

"Yeah. Speaking of Irony…I've met her before, wonder what happened to her. Pretty psychotic, though last time I saw her, she was…a circus acrobat?" Bear seemed to be muttering to himself.

"Nah, clown. She loved to make the kids happy, ironically…haha, she was a very interesting woman, and it took me 10 years before she even gave me the time of day." Kyoto mused with a soft ghost of a smile on his face. "Well, let's get on with this so we can both go about our business."

Dropping back into a fighting stance, Kyoto watched the figure in front of him. Bear raised one of his tomahawks and launched it forward quickly. Kyoto dodged it to the side as he moved toward his opponent. Bear tossed his second tomahawk in a horizontal spin toward Kyoto. Doing a baseball slide under the spinning axe, Kyoto looked to kick the larger man in the leg, but his kick was side stepped. Sliding past Bear, Kyoto grabbed one of the man's thick legs, and used that to shift his momentum, going from sliding across the floor to flipping up and laying a double-footed kick to the top of the man's back. Bear stumbled forward, and Kyoto took that opportunity to follow up with a kick to the side of the thigh, and a punch to the middle of his spine. Bear spun around and backhanded Kyoto in the face, sending the white-haired man spiraling toward a far wall.

Twisting in the air, he placed his feet out toward the wall, using that to set himself, before he pushed off of the wall again, diving back toward Bear. The larger man had grabbed his tomahawks and launched one toward Kyoto's incoming form. Adjusting mid-air, Kyoto flipped over the incoming axe and caught it in his hands, before ducking the next one and flinging it at Bear.

Ducking out of the way, Bear charged Kyoto full speed. Jumping, Kyoto laid a snapping kick to the large man's jaw, sending him spiraling into the side of the large wooden bar the white-haired man had been sitting at moments before. Bear stood groggily with his jaw at an unnatural angle, to find Kyoto seemingly having a lot of fun hanging onto the ceiling fan as it spun him slowly around. Placing a foot on the wall, he jumped from the fan toward Bear, before flipping in the air to kick the man in the face.

Bear dodged to the side, but Kyoto grabbed him by the neck as he went by, using the large man's body to change his direction, causing him to shoot up over Bear's head. And coming down, his boots slammed into the top of the man's shoulder, leading to him being crushed into the ground with a snapping of bones. And with a sad smile, he snapped the man's neck.

Reaching over the counter, he grabbed one of the bottle of rum and walked out of the bar sipping it, while at the same time lighting a cigarette, smoking a drag every time he wasn't drinking from the bottle.

-----

Baretta was in the one place he never wanted to be in his life. A Karaoke bar in south Tokyo. He wished he could have worn earmuffs, it was truly a horrific sound, that which was karaoke, and it took all of his restraint not to shoot every person who thought about touching the microphone on the stage that evening. The only thing that would tide him over was the knowledge that, before the night was over, someone, or someones, would be receiving a quite thorough ass-kicking at his hands.

Sitting at the bar, he was immediately approached by the barkeeper. However, he reached into his jacket and pulled out his own flask. The bartender turned after nodding, and went back to cleaning glasses while actually bobbing his head to the god-awful screeching sound coming from the small girl singing some old 80's song while shaking her pink-and-green-streaked hair around enthusiastically, further causing her voice to sound even worse.

Baretta lowered his head to the bar table and thumped it on the hardwood surface a few times before finally screwing the cap on his flask, pocketing it and standing up resolutely. He walked to the back of the bar and right through the 'Employees Only' door, and into the back room. The startled worker that stood before him met a quick dispatching into unconsciousness with a kick to the groin from the tall, gray-clad man's military issue steel-toeds, and a chop to the back of the neck.

Baretta was there for information. Apparently there was a Chinese-British man by the name of Lei Chang hiding out in Japan to escape the growing tension in the United Kingdom.

Baretta didn't like deserters. But what he liked even less than that, were people who kept political problems going for their own benefit. Lei Chang held, in his possession, something that held a great deal of value to their cause. And he was using his possession of the item as a means to draw out the currently building conflict that was going on back in England that, day by day, inched closer to full-scale war.

Looking around the back room, his eyes fell on the circuit breaker. Walking over to it, he opened the metallic casing, scanning the labeling on it before realizing he couldn't read Japanese, and really had no wish to have learned. Hearing the scurry of footsteps rushing his way, he flipped one of his handguns over so he held it by the barrel, before slamming the butt of the handle into the circuit breaker, shorting out all the power. He was quite thankful that this caused the power to be lost to the PA system, as the screeching coming from whoever was on stage at the time was so annoying he was surprised his ears weren't bleeding, or hadn't stopped working altogether in protest of their foul treatment.

The door behind him flew open, but the darkness in the room allowed him to hide silently. Slipping the handgun back into his holsters, he reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a Billy club. Someone walked, what he assumed was supposed to be quietly, in front of him, and he received a thump on the back of the head with the club that sent him in a heap onto the floor.

Baretta knew he lacked the fighting finesse that Kyoto held, but in all his time, he never knew a time where he needed it. It didn't need to look pretty if you were going to be the only one leaving the fight alive, or in condition enough to talk about, nonetheless remember, the fight.

The next man that rushed him learned the Fallen's philosophy first hand, as he received a straight side-kick to the side of his knee cap, shattering it under the power of Baretta's kick enhanced by the weight of the boots he wore. Falling to one knee, his jaw was shattered by the slamming of the Billy club to his face. Baretta had no idea if the man lived at all, but he didn't care. His looking down to think about it caused another man to be able to get fairly close to him. Baretta felt a hand wrap around his neck. Bringing the club in his hand up, he slammed it into the underside of man's elbow, effectively breaking it into fragments.

The recoil this caused was enough time for Baretta to side-step and ram the injured man's head into the now destroyed circuit breaker. There was the sound of an electric surge before the body slumped to the ground.

The last man to rush Baretta met a backhand before he was pinned down by Baretta's knee on his chest. "Where is Lei Chang?"

The man's face was in view because of how close Baretta was to him, and Baretta grinned to himself seeing not a bit of confusion cross the man's eyes. However, instead of answering, as Baretta knew he understood the question, he began rambling off in Japanese. Rolling his eyes, Baretta stretched one of the man's hands out and then slammed the bottom of the Billy club onto his pinky finger. The snap of bones echoed around the room.

"I'll ask again. Where is Lei Chang?"

The interrogation continued well into the toes. By the time Baretta got the information he was seeking and opened a rip and disappeared from the scene, the man had 2 toes still operational and the rest of his digits were in a state of uselessness. Including his groin area, the abuse of which had been a particularly loud event, but had also been the breaking point in the man's silence. The police arrived to a broken man laying on the ground in a fetal position sobbing. After an assessment of what had happened, the lead ranking officer glanced down at the broken man silently before pulling out his side-arm.

"It would have been best for you to have stayed silent. You would have died either way, but now, instead of dying at this mysterious man's hands with honor, you will die at mine, a spineless betrayer. You are a disgrace" he spoke in Japanese, before pulling the trigger.

-----

"I need a nap."

"No."

"Please?"

"No."

"But Mum…"

"No."

"…"

"No."

"So you don't want to retire to my place and be tired out?"

"No…Wait…Dammit Harry!"

Harry laughed to himself as he continued scanning the papers in front of him. Blaise was tinkering away at the computer in front of her in the library they were working at, both looking for the same information. Some trace of Lucius Malfoy.

After much prodding, Kyoto had revealed the blonde had been bitten and thusly became a vampire, and with the vampirism virus being much more dangerous than the lycanthrope virus, when left in the hands of one such as Malfoy, their priority was the find the man. Whereas the leader of the werewolves, one Fenrir Greyback, was quite ornery, he was really only a contamination hazard once a month. However, every night was bite night for Lucius, it seemed. And Baretta was getting tired of hunting vampires.

Said Fallen had decided to go on his own personal road trip to some place without so much as a word, and Kyoto was in Australia last they heard from him, no one exactly sure how he ended up there considering the man had a habit of never carrying any money with him.

That left Lulu, Harry and Blaise, all of whom were currently sitting in the library around a table doing various things. Blaise was darting around on the internet searching for information of unexplained happenings, thankful that Rose had given her open access to the older girl's departmental database. Harry was reading through the newspapers, not expecting much from the more upstanding ones, but the tabloids working well to give him some hope of finding something remotely useful. Lulu in her own right was being no help, but was also not being a distraction. She sat in a chair filing at her nails, her long hair behind her reaching the floor as she leaned the chair back on its back two legs. Harry often watched the woman, she was intriguing to him.

The first time he had seen her in a straight up battle, which had been against a werewolf they had run across, she had awed him simply by the simplicity of her motions, casting the spells she did made her not the most mobile of targets, but she was by far the most area-damaging of the group. One of her spells had decimated the wolf, along with two others from his pack he had called as back-up. They had been small and newly turned, not the most powerful of wolves, but they had still been above human in power, and they were still felled by the spell Lulu had cast.

The woman had walked away as if nothing had happened, still eyeing Kyoto out of the corner of her eye. The two of them had an odd situation, even Harry could see that. Lulu would speak during group discussions and get told, quite rudely, to shut her mouth by Kyoto. Lulu seemed to often times try and back Kyoto up over every else, as if trying to make something up to the man, a past discrepancy she had made perhaps, but often times the help when unwanted, or even became counterproductive.

At one point Kyoto had cornered Lucius and was giving the man a thorough beating, including such moves as a kick to the groin, putting cigarettes out in various places on the blonde's body, as well as a backhand that spun the vampire around, causing him to take the punch that followed to the back of the head. The man was downed and Kyoto was moving in for the kill when Lulu began to cast a fire-based spell on the downed Malfoy. Kyoto was forced to move out of the way, therefore unable to press his advantage, which ended up costing them all as Lucius was saved by another Death Eater spear-tackling Lulu, sending her spell awry and allowing Lucius to get away with a quickly activated portkey.

As Harry contemplated Lulu, he was pulled back to concentrating as Blaise apparently found something. He knew she had found something important just a second before she gasped it out, which was another thing he had found interesting, being able to feel her like that. He glanced over and saw her gazing at one of the websites. She pointed to it and Harry moved around to check on it and gasped as well. He checked the time at the bottom of the screen on the computer before cursing to himself. "We need to go now."

"Yeah…Damn I wish Kyoto and Baretta were around, would make this a lot easier."

Harry nodded in agreement of Blaise, before glancing to Lulu. She looked up at him and raised an elegant eyebrow, not making any attempt to stand. Harry sighed before reaching down and lifting his pack up, the woman was just so bloody difficult! Blaise grabbed her pack as well and grabbed his hand after closing down the windows on the computer. They headed toward the door, not looking back. Halfway to the door, they heard a loud sigh and the sound of feet behind them. Harry grinned to Blaise, keeping his back to the incoming Lulu.

"Nice to have you with us." Harry spoke just loud enough for Lulu to know he was talking to him. He could almost hear her roll her eyes at this. He smiled to himself before opening the door and holding it open until she got there, something that he knew she hated.

-----

Operating out of the back of a large van is usually reserved for child molesters, police undercover operations, and people selling things from the back of said van, be it clothing, music or illegal wares. The back of the van they were operating out of however, had enough swag that, should they get searched, all of them would be in jail for life, and with Kyoto and Baretta and their undetermined lifespans, that would be much too long for their own goods.

Sliding into the driver's seat, Lulu adjusted the mirrors and moved the seat forward to accommodate her short stature. Kyoto was by far the tallest of them all, however his legs took most of his height, so while the seat was far back, the mirrors weren't in such a place to reflect a taller-while-seated person. Whereas Baretta was a lot more bulky, he was by far the tallest, seated. His mirrors were raised as such, especially since he had the tendency to use them to gaze at those in the backseat to shoot them sour glances when they did something to annoy him, like breathing too loudly, or at all.

Lulu adjusted everything before starting the van. Harry was sitting in the back, tinkering with a stack of magazines for his handguns. The standard ones he used never ran out of ammunition because of Baretta's toying with space and time. However, there were other sets of magazines, ones that Harry and Blaise enchanted with different magic. Harry was currently holding a set that held flame enchantments on them, added damage to the vampires. He suspected they'd run into a good lot of them, considering Lucius had decided to open his own hive, something Harry himself knew wasn't going well with the vampire council.

Not that Voldemort gave a damn about that particular group of people.

Blaise on the other hand was meditating. It was something she did before a big fight, centering her mind. It also allowed her to easily draw on more of Harry's Demonic powers, and a lot more quickly. This helped her reflexes a lot, she found, and when operating with vampires, it helped her a lot to be stealthy and do a lot of damage from behind with them unaware of her presence, usually a vein nicking, throat slashing or vertebrae severing. But should they decide to not die from this and turn to her, the added boost to her speed to get her out alive while Harry finished them off helped a lot.

Lulu put the van in gear and merged onto the street. Or tried. A shiny red convertible nearly rammed them, before laying on the horn and the guy inside of it began shouting many expletives at Lulu. Seeing her fingering her scythes, Harry rolled his eyes and yanked open the back door to the van and jumped out.

His boots hit the pavement and he walked calmly to the driver's side of the car. His hands jammed deep in his pockets, a flat grin plastered to his face. Coming up to the side of the car, he looked down at the driver who, in his rush to hurl more insults at Lulu, hadn't even heard Harry arrive.

Leaning against the car, Harry watched the man for a bit longer. He wore bright, pastel shades of pink and green that Harry honestly didn't think any male should be wearing. When the man didn't acknowledge Harry's existence and kept shouting, the dark haired boy finally grew tired of it.

Reaching up and wrapping the man's pompous ponytail around his hand, he bounced his head off of the steering wheel. It wasn't something he would have done months ago, he admitted to himself, but something about being surrounded by death so much, death, pain and horror, made it so he lacked tolerance for people who acted like he was, about such simple things as a parking space or a car.

He had watched people killed indiscriminately for little things in this war, someone shouting at one of the few people fighting and being hurt to save their lives without them even knowing was something Harry wouldn't deal with.

Reaching in and opening the car door from the inside, he pulled the now unconscious man from his car before getting into the driver's seat. Blaise had since gotten out of the back of the van, and seeing the look on Harry's face, had closed the door after grabbing his and her bags. Opening the door, the now unconscious, brightly-dressed man's girlfriend, who had been sitting, open-mouthed, watching this whole set of events, screeched and hopped from the car.

She sat down in the passenger's seat and smiled at Lulu, who chuckled at the girl before being waved into traffic by Harry. She drove out ahead of him, and he gunned the car's engine before following behind her, smirking as Blaise scratched the back of his head gently.

-----

Baretta hated the color pink.

Deeply.

He had often times toyed with the idea of shooting anyone who wore it. However, after chancing a day outside on a holiday called "St. Valentine's Day", he realized that it could possibly test the truth to his "never-ending" ammunition theory.

He still toyed with the idea quite often, the color was, in fact, quite offensive.

However, standing at this party, his hate for the color grew even greater. Everything was pink. All shades of the color, from pale and disgusting, to bright and obnoxious, to loud and overwhelming. He had been on a lead for a bit concerning the daughter of Lei Chang. She was engaged, and her bachelorette party was to begin. Knocking on the door, it was quickly flung open by an awkwardly blonde woman with what looked to be a mass of makeup on her forehead. She cheered and yanked him in before slamming the door behind him.

"Girls, look who's here…" She spoke as she led him into a room full of females about the same age, all dressed in the same mass of pink.

"Who?" They all chimed.

"The stripper!" The girl shouted, before pushing Baretta on the back gently, and then running over and slapping a stereo system. Music began to play and everyone in the room cheered. All but Baretta, who had to physically remove his right hand from the handle of his handgun. He was feeling in deep need of a bullet-storm in that room, as the girls wailed and shouting for him to "take it off."

Glancing around the room, his eyes narrowed as he checked for the girl he was searching for. He knew which one it was, as she was the one wearing a very stupid looking witches' hat, with a shimmy pink veil. He had to decide what to do, he really had no intention of stripping for anyone in the room, as not a one of them looked too old to even be out of school.

Deciding for a more direct route, he walked over to her, grabbed her arm, lifted her up and walked her into a side room of the hotel room. He slammed the door to cat-calls from the other girls in the room. Locking the door, he turned back to the girl before removing his duster and tossing it to the side. Her eyes glanced over his sleeveless black shirt and his faded, almost gray, blue jeans.

They then locked onthe gun holsters at his sides. As she watched this, he reached down to the back belt-hoop of his pants and pulled out a tube. Shaking it, it revealed itself to be a telescoping rod of some kind. Clicking a button on the side, it revealed itself to be a cattle prod. Grinning to himself, he held the button down, allowing the electricity to jump between to two protruding studs on the end so she could see it.

"So…I still might end up taking my clothes off. If you make this hard, that is. Electrocuting someone can be quite physically intensive, after-all, and I may get a bit sweaty.

"Or, I could stay dressed, you could give me answers, and not feel like you shoved a knife into an electrical socket. So…decision is yours, after all, this is your party. You can cry if you want to."

And he grinned evilly at her before sending the electricity into a visible incarnation before the girl's eyes. Oh how he loved interrogations.

-----