Sleepwalker Part 5:

"I don't have to go there…" Fay's voice was quiet; the energy he had shown at the mall seemed to have disappeared and left him almost lethargic as he once again sat at the passenger seat in Kurogane's car.

Tomoyo had left them with a happy "Goodbye! See you tomorrow, Fay-san!" and Kurogane had simply refused to speak to him since then. Instead he was staring straight at the road, teeth clenched and the curses still going on in his head like a mantra.

The black haired man snorted.

"Shouldn't think so, she'll probably come to my apartment and drag you out. After all, she bought it, and she probably kept a spare key…"

The blonde made a peculiar little sound of amusement.

"She's a pretty determined young lady, isn't she?"

Kurogane looked away from the road for a moment to glare at him.

"You will go there tomorrow, you will behave and if you do anything, just anything, to hurt Tomoyo, I promise you I'll make you regret it."

Fay chuckled humourlessly, eyes fixed on something in the distance that might be something real or some ghost from the past, Kurogane wasn't going to ask…

"I know you don't have any reasons to trust my word, Kuro-sama, but I won't be a threat to your lady Tomoyo-san."

"You better not," Kurogane still sounded like he was about to kill something, but the last kilometre of the driving felt a little less tensed than the previous two and a half.

As they arrived, Watanuki was waiting on the steps in front of the door, looking utterly displeased.

"How do postmen deliver mails to this place," he spat, "there are no mailboxes outside and the door is locked!"

"It's a private area; the post office has the code to the door," Kurogane eyed the boy with suspiciousness, "what do the witch want?"

Watanuki stood and handed the older man an envelope.

"Yuuko-san told me to give you this, she thought it might interest you," he frowned, "I have no idea what it is, she wouldn't even allow me to look at it."

"Hmm," he took the envelope, "it can be anything between cake recipes to poison spiders if I know that woman right, thanks."

"Whatever, I'm off…" The youngster disappeared down the road. The police office was on the other side of the town but Kurogane assumed that he was rather used being sent away to most parts of the place by now.

Fay waited quiet behind, his expression difficult to interpret, but it was clear that the envelope made him uneasy. Hell, that wasn't so weird, after all. If the guy had as many skeletons in the wardrobe as Kurogane suspected, it would be more than possible for the sly police chief to ferret some of them out. He tucked it under his arm, opened the door and lifted up the carrier bags from the store again, even if he didn't want to let it show, he was eager to see what was inside the first coffin…

Ten minutes later he sat in the apartment's combined work and living room with the papers from the envelope in front of him. He had offered to help Fay cleaning up after the breakfast but the lean man had simply smiled and told him that he didn't mind doing it by himself 'especially not now when Kuro-chan had been nice enough to buy all those new clothes for him and besides Kuro-sama's boss had sent him important papers to read, hadn't she?'. Absentminded, he fumbled for a whiskey bottle hidden in the bookshelf beside the sofa; it was put behind the car's manual and a book about political history that his grandma had once given him, the only two books he was sure that Yuuko would never be interested in. Not caring to go get a glass, he opened it and took a full swallow of the bittersweet fluid, a pretty cheap, Canadian brand that tasted a bit like decayed wood.

"Hello Kurogane-kun." Already the first line made him grimace, did the damn woman really have to use that particle inletters even?

"I have done a little research and found this report; I think it might interest you. I hope you're aware of the fact that I have now done your job for you and that I'll expect a favour done in return later." There was a little doodle of a butterfly with spread wings in the left corner of the note.

Annoyed, Kurogane crumpled the paper and threw it at the floor, that woman was a demon, nothing less than that. He had never asked for her help in the first place so why the hell did he now owe her?! But he was still curious about the report she had found important enough to send Watanuki over with. Evil or not, the witch was also undoubtedly intelligent. And there seemed to be very little information confidential enough for her not to find. If he ever asked where and how she got hold of it she would only smile slyly and say something like "If you're a really good boy I might consider telling you…" and Kurogane would just course and shut the door as hard as he could behind him as he left the room in frustration.

He took another sip from the bottle and began to read. The report was written by a Norwegian police woman, starting twenty nine years ago and judging by the length of it, the girl had been very interested in the case.

Exactly twenty nine years, two month and three days ago, a new born child had disappeared from a hospital in Oslo. The father was unknown and the mother died one week later in a car crash (her death had been labelled as "suicide"). The child was, as Yuuko had commented in the marginal, born two days before the date when Fay's name had been registered.

The Norwegian police, Miss Andersen, who seemed settled to solve the case, had looked up all boy children born in the same area one week after the newborn's disappearance. Fay was among those children and for some reason he had caught Andersen's interest, because she had written much more about him then she had about any of the other boys.

He was born in a small village by the coast and just like the first child, he was born by a young girl who claimed not to know who the father was. Some weeks later he had been adopted by a couple in which the man was head for a nonconformist churchand the woman was a parish matron. Two years after the adoption, Yuuko's messy writing informed him, the family had moved from the village and no one knew where they had gone. As it was time for Fay to start elementary school, the Norwegian authority had had to assume that they had left the country, taking the boy with them, but no emigration had ever been registered.

"Interesting wasn't it, Kurogane-kun? I hope you have enjoyed your day of and that you and Fay fit with each other. I expect to see you by your desk tomorrow, since Tomoyo-chan should have been able to catch you and help you deal with Fay."

Kurogane almost choked on the last mouthful of whiskey. He should have known that the witch was behind it all. Bloody hell, he had to find a way to make her stop manage his life like a freaking marionette theatre. He cursed for himself and put the now half emptied bottle back behind the books as he suddenly felt like being watched.

Fay stood in the door, watching him with uncertain eyes and a sad looking smile. Kurogane supposed that he was wondering if the papers had let know something bad enough to convince the other to throw him back at the street, in jail or just take the easy road and kill him off right now and there. Surprised, the black haired man suddenly realized that the reading had probably had the opposite effect on him because when he now looked upon the thin blonde and his haunted blue eyes he no longer saw a cold hearted killer but a lost child. Of course that didn't meant that he trusted the man but maybe he wasn't really what Kurogane had accused him of being either. Yuuko's intuition was seldom wrong…

Maybe it would appear that "cold hearted killer" had been to prefer, though, Kurogane sighed inside. It wasn't a good idea to get soft on someone you might have to send to execution the next day. It's already too late for that, a voice abruptly spoke up inside his mind, you would sooner kill him by your own hands, regardless of what it would cost you. You made that decision as you let him inside your apartment, didn't you?

He put down the papers in the drawer on the other side of the sofa and looked up at Fay with an eyebrow raised.

"If it's the dinner that smells like that," he said, "I might actually consider reducing your upcoming rent… If Tomoyo don't pay you higher salaries than I have, that is…"

Surprise flashed trough Fay's features before they arranged back into the same smile again, eyes looking somewhat relieved.

"Well, it seems like I remember some of my old cooking skills after all," he said softly, "I hope that Kuro-chan will enjoy escaping from bachelor life for a while…"

"I won't be able to save you another time," Yuuko had warned him some years ago, "if you ever decide to kill again, it better be worth it because the court won't hesitate to judge for the previous times as well. There are things that you have to do, and things that doesn't matter, remember that!"

There was an alternative, if he only could see a single possibility of Fay being innocent to at least this last murder. But then, who was he to judge?

A tiny smirk, filled with irony, played on his lips as he followed the blonde to the kitchen. A police man who's dirty past was hidden by his witch-like boss and a murder suspect who had been kidnapped as baby and raised in some yet unknown sect; it was all like the worst kind of cheap TV-thriller.

The question of importance right now was if he could manage find out about all this before who ever it was that Fay fled from found there way there. The man might be an unusually manipulative and false bastard but right now Kurogane felt like he was ready to solve the puzzle started by the Norwegian police already twenty nine years before…