A/N: All disclaimers and warnings continue to apply; please refer to notes before the Prologue.

Sorry this one's a bit short. Unexpected RL circumstances have greatly impacted on the posting schedule, so I thought a short bit may be better than nothing.

Thanks again to all who have reviewed; they are both encouragement and reward, and I sincerely treasure each one.

Chapter 8: Theory and Practice

An empty room.

A pool of blood. More smeared across the wall. The copper tang of it filling his nostrils.

Shredded orange jersey fabric, blotched with red, scattered over a cold cement floor.

A glove ... a leather glove ... Ken's abandoned weapon ...

His own harsh breathing, the beat of his heart filling the silence.

Aya stood stock still, frozen with emotions roiling through him--rage and panic and dread and despair and horror and so many others he couldn't acknowledge or express. Ken wasn't wearing his old jersey, he realized. Ken wasn't going to make the rendezvous point, he realized. The target … Ken had missed the target completely.

The target hadn't missed Ken.

He couldn't think. He couldn't think. He tried to look as blank as he knew how.

It was long minutes before he realized someone was yelling at him. Yohji. It was Yohji yelling at him. Loudly. The words were too loud. They didn't make any sense--just noise, too much noise …

He had to get out of here. Ken was … Ken was … He couldn't be here. He turned towards where he thought Yohji should be, and said, carefully, as clearly and evenly as he could manage, "We should go."

He had no idea where to go, or how. He just needed to get out of that deserted, blood-drenched room.

He had no idea how he might have looked, standing so still, concentrating so hard, as hard as he could on keeping his face expressionless.

He had no idea …

Yohji suddenly started yelling at him for being cold and uncaring and how could he not even flinch when Ken ...

And then Yohji abruptly slapped him, hard, across the face.

It hurt.

"Aya. We have to go. They're coming, Aya. We have to go, go get Ken." Yohji was speaking, very slowly--why was Yohji speaking so slowly? Aya tried to focus, and blinked. Yohji's face was close, too close; Yohji's face was anxious, fear and anger and concern etched into unfamiliar lines across Yohji's normally smooth, lazy-eyed face.

Aya staggered. The raw emotion leaking out of Yohji and all over him was more than he could bear. What did it matter, what did anything matter? Ken was dead, Ken was ...

Yohji's hands were on his arms, Yohji was holding him up … Yohji was shaking him, saying something. "He's not dead, Aya. Do you hear me? Ken's not dead. He's still alive. He's still alive, and Omi can track him, Aya, Aya, he's not dead!"

Not dead? Ken was … He looked at Yohji, wild-eyed. Yohji was speaking to him, he realized. "We can get him back. We can get Ken back, Aya. But you need to move. Move!"

They could get Ken? Yes, yes, that made sense. Go get Ken. Yohji knew where Ken was. Yohji would take him. Yohji had grabbed his hand, was pulling him through a window, and he followed, scaling the wall as Yohji directed, fighting when Omi told him, trying not to remember ...

Ken standing at the edge of a soccer field shouting instructions to a group of eager and adoring kids; Ken ducking discreetly behind a convenient shelf to kiss him, not long, but hard and deep and clearly showing the skill of a fast learner; Ken scornfully debunking some theoretical point of Aya's latest philosophical text; Ken lying with his head in Aya's lap, warm and damp and smelling cleanly of soap, deep asleep in the middle of the afternoon despite the soccer game playing on TV; Ken reaching up, eyes soft and tender, gently brushing hair off Aya's face and putting careful bandages on cuts and scrapes post-mission; Ken shirtless and damp from the shower, sauntering past him and smirking in a manner clearly designed to tease—

The guards were good. They were heavy and large and very, very good, and had guns and were good with them too. Aya almost took two bullets, grazing shoulder and thigh, flesh wounds that burned and throbbed and kept him grounded, brought him back to the moment, to the simple motions of fighting, of moving his katana through air and flesh and bone, before Omi gave the signal and they were running, he and Yohji, running and running ...

Bleeding and incoherent, he fought them when they tried to make him get in the car, and leave without Ken. He fought them, but in the end, Bombay pulled rank, calling him Aya-kun in that way he had, overly familiar and superior but somehow still so respectful, Omi's face tight with worry and self-doubt and, in the end, there was enough left of Abyssinian that he responded to the strict command, although somewhere deep inside, Aya kept screaming, and Ran kept crying.

But then, Aya and Ran had been doing that for a long, long time now.

Aya was laughing, gentle and sweet, and Ken couldn't help but smile as Aya lifted a corner of the blanket, raising that graceful eyebrow in entreaty, Aya's eyes warm and loving. Ken shivered. He was cold, and his clothes were damp and somewhere, something hurt. It must have been raining, Ken thought, not really remembering how he had ended up so cold and wet and sore. Behind Aya, he could see the clear blue sky outside, with the sun shining brightly, and Ken became confused, wondering … But Aya laughed again, throaty and seductive, shifting alluringly where he lay. Aya was naked, lying so enticingly on the bed, on sheets of fine indigo silk, the deep shade reflecting the incredible colour of Aya's eyes, bright and shining with love, love for him, and Ken moved to take a step forward, and found he couldn't. He couldn't move, he was tied up, soft ribbons binding his wrists, wrapped around his ankles, and Ken frowned, slightly, tugging firmly at the bindings. Aya was fonder of these types of games than Ken was, but these ribbons were tight, and Aya never tied him so tightly, never enough to confine, never enough that Ken couldn't get free if he really wanted, never …

Ken woke abruptly. He was alone, struggling futilely against thick, knotted ropes, which bound him hand and foot and tightly enough to cut off circulation. He was cold, freezing really, and kinda dizzy; and the wetness was, he supposed, blood. He could feel it, seeping thick and warm against his chilled skin. Pain wracked his body at every slight movement, every time he shivered. There was so much pain, everywhere: flaring particularly bright across his ribs, in his right shoulder, along his left calf, the small of his back on the left side. He tried, but couldn't stop shivering.

He'd been caught. He'd been caught, like an idiot, like the fool that Aya always said he'd never suffer gladly, glaring all the while. Aya was going to be so freakin' mad at him, he thought. So he needed to get out of here, because if he didn't, Aya was going to skin him alive, and what was left, Omi would mash into a fine pulp. Omi in a rage—a real rage—was rare but scarier than Aya. And then, worst of all, Yohji, Yohji who was never serious and rarely sober, Yohji would make him sit down and listen to a lecture about responsibility and taking care of himself and proper procedures. Ken shuddered, cursing whatever impulse had made him dash headlong into that room full of guards, even if they hadn't seemed that competent, and struggled harder against the ropes, trying to remember every bit of training he'd ever had about what to do when tied up, and didn't really care that his wrists and ankles were already slick with blood, didn't really notice the burning pain where the ropes cut into raw, abraded flesh.

He'd seen what Kobayashi did to his victims--his commodities, his failed employees, enemies.

He needed to get free. He needed to get out of here. He needed, he wanted, he had to go home. But struggling, he soon found, was useless.

Panic forced him to keep struggling.

Pain and exhaustion, a mere hour later, made him stop.

Aya had no idea how they'd gotten back home. He thought Omi had been driving, even though they almost never let the kid drive. Kill: yes; drive either of their cars: no. But Omi had driven Aya's beloved car through snow-slick streets and Aya couldn't care less, because all he could do was try to blank his mind as well as his face and look calm, and collected, and everything he'd always been expected to be, all his effort undone by the unbidden, repetitive memory of the moment he'd first realized Ken was gone, reliving itself over and over in his head.

They'd looked for Ken. Afterwards, they'd looked for Ken. They failed to find him. Nor did they find any sign of where he'd gone. The tracker wasn't picking up. There was no trace, no trail. No schedule or map or any fucking clue on any of the computers they'd scanned, Omi's fingers flying over the keys of the multiple systems he'd hacked into, uncharacteristically impatient, his lack of patience causing errors, making Omi curse, making Aya growl, while Yohji smoked, cigarette after cigarette, making the air around them thick and toxic.

Kritiker's training had never prepared them for this. Kritiker expected its agents to either kill or be killed. Capture was never part of the scenario. Rescue was never authorized. None of them knew, although each of them, privately, in the dead of night, had considered, all the possibilities of what could happen to an agent that was captured.

There was nothing left to do but go home.

SoAya kept blinking, trying to focus, feeling a terrible, frozen sense of déjà vu. Blinking over and over again, just like he had in those dreadful minutes after he'd returned home from a silly, careless day of following his sister around fair stalls for her birthday, bickering and laughing, to find everything and everyone he loved broken and bleeding and dead to him. The same sick, horrifying realization, after hoping for hours outside an operating room while holding a box of earrings, sitting in a hard hospital chair as doctors told him his sister was in a coma, would never wake up, would never be whole again, The same feeling as only hours after kissing Ken, teasing him about not being able to make soup from a bloody can, to climbing those stairs to that horribly empty blood-stained room, leaving the warehouse without Ken, arriving home without Ken, Yohji still talking, talking, tugging at his clothes, an urgent look on his face and saying things Aya couldn't comprehend; Omi finally, blessedly intervening, telling Yohji to stop, to leave him alone, to—

Ken was gone. Just like all the others. He was gone—taken, and they had no leads, no information, no hope of finding him ...

Ken was gone.

All the others had been taken, said Manx. They'd been found—returned, more accurately, as warning---dead, or ... worse.

And try as he might, he couldn't shake that numbness, that oddly detached feeling that this was all a dream, that soon, soon he would wake up, that in just another moment he would wake up and all the horror would be over, wake up and his world would be safe, would be whole, would be clean again.

Slowly, he climbed the stairs to his room, to their room, and pushed open the door. Ken's jeans lay haphazardly across the bed, and in the corner, a stray cleat peaked out from under it.

Aya suddenly found himself standing over a wastebasket, throwing up, his stomach emptying itself over the image of that pool of blood, the stained shirt, the leather glove that had belonged to his love ...

He'd thought his world had fallen apart years ago. He thought he knew what it was like to die.

It shouldn't hurt so much to kill a dead man. If Aya hadn't been so numb, he might have been surprised at how much it still did.

On to chapter 9 –again, sorry for the delay. Please review / e-mail feedback if you can-- all feedback is greatly appreciated; I appreciate both positive comments as well as criticism.

And thanks to you for still reading.