AN: wow it has been over a month since my last update i am so sorry. saturday's ep gave me the motivation to finish ngl. it was rough but also so beautiful and kano was a douche. it also gave the motivation to provide this chap with the ending that that i did. anyways, hope you enjoy the occasional irony easter eggs that i put in here! (ex: kano and knives, seto and puppy, etc.)
disclaimer: if i owned kagepro there would be a lot more kano and seto interaction.
Tsubomi Kido does not like smoke. It snakes down her throat and nests in her lungs and makes her eyes swell. Right now, it surrounds her, a cloud that prevents her from seeing her feet, and a fear that grips her heart and squeezes harshly.
Kano is the one to break her out of her daze, ironically. His hand slides into hers and pulls, his voice rising frantically above the screams of the shoppers. But he himself is not frantic; instead, he is calm and focused, tugging her through the cosmetics section with a sharp yet reassuring grin on his face.
Stumbling every now and then, Kido looks around for Shintaro, hoping to see his telltale red jacket somewhere, but she doesn't catch sight of him. "Wait," Kido shouts, voice hoarse from the grey that billows around her. "Wait, Kano, where's Shintaro?"
Kano pauses, grin faltering for a minute, and Kido sees the fear that momentarily glimmers in his eyes. "Don't know," he replies. He sounds like he doesn't really care, and Kido wonders if that's true. "But don't worry, he'll be fine. Right now, we just have to find a way out before we're caught, okay?"
They are standing beside a display filled with fancy brushes used to apply blush, and Kano's white jacket is smudged with dirt. He follows Kido's gaze for a moment, then quickly proceeds to rip it off and toss it behind a random counter.
"Made me more noticeable," he explains, shrugging and smiling and seemingly not bothered at all by the situation they were in.
Kido coughs twice to clear her throat, and nods.
Without another word, Kano turns around and starts walking again, hand still clenched around Kido's wrist. "Wellll," he babbles, and every once in a while he will look behind him to make sure Kido is okay. "I guess this kinda throws a wrench in our plans for dinner, huh? Too bad, it sounded like such a fun da-"
"If you add an t-e to that word," Kido interrupts. "You will die." The only reason she hadn't hit him immediately is because she had figured it would be fairly counterproductive to the whole 'escape and find help' plan.
"Okay, okay, calm down." He takes a sharp right, dragging Kido along with him, and almost knocking over a rack of nightgowns. "There's a staircase right next to the changing rooms. Hopefully, they won't have any guards around it, and we can-"
"Hey, you two! Freeze!" The voice comes from in front of them, and Kido can see the faint shape of a man carrying a gun approaching them.
Kano curses under his breath and pushes Kido behind him, finally releasing the hold on her wrist. "Run," he mutters, a grin still showing on the area of cheek that Kido can see. "Go into the racks and work your way around; I'll distract him."
"Like hell," Kido whispers back fiercly, and she itches to smack the back of his head because he is being so stupid. "I'm not leaving without you."
"Kidoooo," Kano whines, moving so he takes up more of the space that is between her and the gunman. "You're being so difficuuuuult. Can't you just do what I say for once?"
"Because," she growls back. "You're an idiot. And I promised myself a long time ago that I wouldn't do what idiots tell me to do."
By now, the gunman has reached both of them, and Kido has lost her chance to escape. Even though Kido is taller than Kano, she can't quite see around him, so she is forced to rely on hearing only.
"Hands behind your backs, both of you," Kido hears. The voice is rough, and muffled by what is probably a mask of some sort. Kano's shoulders tense.
"Isn't the usual order 'above your head,'" he wonders aloud, which proves Kido's point of how he is an idiot.
"What the-," the man says, which is a common reaction to the creature that is Shuuya Kano. "Kid, in case you didn't notice, I'm holding a gun and you're not, so you better do what I say."
"My, my, so harsh. It's not like I was refusing to do it. I was just asking."
"Yeah, and I'm just doing my job and taking you two hostage. Now, hands behind your back."
Kido and Kano both comply with varying speeds, and the gunman moves forward, zipties in hand. He secures Kano first, poking the gun barrel into his stomach for good measure, then moves onto Kido. He is surveying her figure as he ties her, a nasty smirk in place, but he stops as soon as he catches sight of her glare. Kido can hear Kano chuckle under his breath.
Neither of them speak as they are dragged back the way they had come, and soon they are grouped with the rest of the hostages that have been herded into the shoe section. Kido casts a longing look at a nearby pair of green Converse, and wonders how a mission as simple as 'buying shoes' managed to be so terribly warped.
"You know, I get an employee's discount on anything in the store," is whispered in her ear, and Kido grits her teeth because Kano is being a dweeb yet again.
"Shut up," she mutters back, turning her head slightly so that he can see the fearsome glare that she wears. "You shouldn't even be worrying about what you're going to do when we get out of here; you should be worrying about how we're going to get out."
Kido is about to continue her verbal thrashing, but a body is dropped beside her before she can. Frozen by the fear that courses through her veins at the sight of one of the gunmen, and by the terrible hilarity of the situation at hand, Kido watches as the newly deposited hostage sits up and smiles toothily, two yellow clips attached to his hair.
"Hi Kano!" Kousuke Seto says with a voice that is much too cheerful, and Kido feels like crying. The gunman has, thankfully, walked away from them by now and does not hear him.
"Seto!" replies Kano, and good god, he sounds cheerful, too. "What are you even doing here?"
"I thought that I would surprise you with a visit! But it seems that idea didn't work out too well..." He chuckles, and his gaze eventually strays a little to the right, only to land directly on Kido. He gapes, then smiles, bigger and brighter than before. "Tsubomi! I didn't know you were here, too!"
Idiots, Kido decides as Seto tries to hug her, despite his hands being tied behind his back; she is surrounded by idiots. Kano is an idiot because stupidity makes up his very core. Seto is an idiot because he doesn't even have the sense to be quiet in a goddamn hostage situation. Just plain idiots.
A faint snapping sound interrupts her internal grumbling, and Kido turns to see Kano with a shrewd smirk on his face. "About time," he comments, and then brings his unbound wrists around to his front so he can rub them.
It takes Kido longer than she would care to admit to figure out what is wrong with this picture. "Y-your hands," she says, eyes wide. Seto just smiles knowingly beside her.
"Kano, I thought we agreed that you would stop taking knives to work," he scolds jokingly, turning so that his back is to Kano and his hands are spread as far apart as possible.
"Ehhh, what can I say," Kano murmurs, a gleam in his eyes. He flicks his hand and suddenly there is a small knife in it, only as long as his thumb. He scoots forward and starts sawing at Seto's binds, the tip of his tongue poking out from between his lips.
"Ho-," Kido starts to say, but her throat is still dry from the smoke and she coughs before continuing. "How did you get that past the gunman? He patted us down." And he had, though Kido's glare had discouraged him from 'patting down' any forbidden places.
"My, my Kido," chuckles Kano, and Seto smiles at her over his shoulder. "You really need to learn about the art of deception." It is but a second later that Seto's wrists are finally freed, and Kano turns to her with his blade held in the air. "And now it's your turn!"
"You are not coming near me with any kind of sharp object in your hand. Absolutely not."
Kano sighs, a small crease appearing between his eyebrows. "Kido, if you're hands aren't freed, you'll only be a hindrance when we escape; you need to-"
"I don't need to do anything," Kido grouched. "And I already told you, I don't follow instructions from idiots."
Seto laughs at that, and murmurs something about "she never changes" that Kido is kind enough to ignore. His voice growing in volume, he then asks, "Would you like me to cut you free, Kido?" He tilts his head and smiles at her.
Now let's get something straight: Tsubomi Kido is a very complex person. And when Seto asks her this, she has several instinctive thoughts swirl into existence almost immediately. For instance, her Idiocy-a-meter (the thing inside her that measures how stupid someone is being), immediately tells her, gunmen or not, that she needs to get away from Seto and Kano now, because they are not to be trusted with knives. Her old self from Yuukei Summer Camp can't help but remember that Kano was the one that had the most skill when they had whittled little statues using only a pocketknife and a small piece of wood. Her common sense, which is what she tends to listen to most, tells her that Seto, with his soft amber eyes and his bright yellow barrettes, is trustworthy.
"Fine," she finally huffs, and turns so that her wrists are exposed to him. Seto sets to work, and once or twice she will feel the coldness of the blade press up her skin, but it never bites into her. Her hands are released from the zipties within a minute.
"There you are," he almost laughs, and she turns back to face him, rubbing her wrists. He holds the hilt of the knife out to Kano, who folds it up and tucks it into the pocket of his jeans. "Now we just have to escape!"
Seto says it as if it is not that big of a deal, no more difficult than completing a hundred piece puzzle or finding the hypotenuse of a 3x4 triangle (the answer is 5, Kido remembers absentmindedly). And for some reason, his carefree attitude aggressively rubs Kido the wrong way and she is suddenly aware of the fact that she is ticked off.
"And how," she growls, fists clenched and frown prominent, "Do you propose we do that?"
Kano is the one to answer her, and he does so with his usual dramatic flair. "Welllll," he mumbles, rubbing his chin as if he has a beard. "If we could just find Shintaro, we could get Taka - ah, Ene - oh yeah Seto, I forgot to tell to tell you that they were here, too! Anyways, we can get Ene to hack into the mall's security system and activate the emergency sprinklers. Though there has to be a reason why they didn't go off when the initial explosions occurred..."
As he trails off, Kido feels a pang of guilt strike her, her earlier angry fading to a dull flame. She had forgotten about Shintaro and Takane (or Ene, since she had said she preferred to be called that now). It had been a while since she had anyone to worry about other than herself, but that was still inexcusable.
"Hey, isn't that Mary?" Kano's voice, which has apparently not lost its mesmerizing quality after all these years, cuts straight into Kido's ears, and she finds herself turning her head in all different directions, searching for the girl with something akin to a hysterical sob rising from her lungs. It just figures, doesn't it.
(She happens to spare a glance in Seto's direction as she looks; his mouth is hanging open and his eyes are wide and she swears that she sees sparkles popping into existence in the air around him. He looks like a lovestruck puppy.)
Kido's eyes finally fall onto a blob of white fluff, and underneath the fluff is a face, young and pale, with pink eyes that are wet with tears and tiny teeth that pull at the skin of her lip. Her shoulders, covered by a light blue dress and lacy white pinafore, are rising up and down swiftly. She looks like she's going to burst into tears at any moment.
"We need to-," Seto starts, and acts as if he's about to get up, but Kano grips his upper arm harshly and pulls him back down.
"You're going to get caught, Seto," Kano chides with a roll of his eyes, but it's pretty obvious that Seto is incapable of focusing of anything that is not Mary for the time being.
"But...," Seto murmurs, "Mary looks upset..." His resemblance to a puppy increases exponentially.
"Don't worry big guy," Kano says, and pats his back reassuringly. "You can go comfort your girlfriend after we figure out how to take down the bad guys."
Seto is undoubtedly about to say a thing or two about the "girlfriend" comment, but Kido interrupts him, a thought beginning to form in her head. "Wait. Seto, did you come here with Mary?"
He shakes his head, and Kano's gaze focuses on the two of them, a single blond eyebrow raises questioningly. "Then...," Kido mumbles, hands gripping each other within the safety of her hoodie pocket. "Then isn't is odd that so many of us are here at the exact same time? I mean there's me, you two, Mary, Shintaro, and Ta - Ene so far. Isn't that a bit of a coincidence?"
Kano nods slowly, and a single hand comes up to push his bangs away from his forehead. "Maybe," he sighs, eyes focusing on the square white tiles that make up the ceiling. "You know, this could all just be fate. Bringing us all together, only to have us all die tragically in a stereotypical hostage situation..."
His face is shoved into the floor by Kido's hand within seconds. "Stop acting like such an idiot, Kano. You're being creepy."
"Seto," he croaks in response, his voice muffled by the carpet. "Promise me something. Once Kido kills me, live strongly while I'm gone!"
Seto snorts, ducking his head in an attempt to hide his smile. "Will do, Bro," he chuckles, flashing a quick thumbs up.
Breathing a deep and heavy sigh, Kido removes her palm from the back of Kano's head, and he pops up into an upright position like a daisy or something. "Okay, now that my life is no longer being threatened, let me actually think about how we can escape, save Mary and Shintaro, and hopefully not get shot." His hand once again begins starts to rub his chin, and Kido doesn't doubt that that is his 'thinking position' because that's just how Kano is.
Kido slowly allows her hopes to rise, just a little, as he sits like that, eyes trained on the floor. After all, though Kano is an idiot of the highest caliber, it's not like he's not smart.
Back at Camp Yuukei, he had been the only one who could get away with getting extra cookies at dinner, and he had once warded off a group of Momo's followers just by using words that flowed from his mouth like ink to a page. He could manipulate people, and he could understand their motives and decisions, no matter how twisted, and his memory was nothing to laugh at, that's for sure. Honestly, Kido had faith that if anyone could get them out of this mess, it was Kano.
(The realization that she actually thought this almost made her gag, but Kido managed not to at the last minute.)
And surveying Kano's face, she can almost see the gears spinning and tumbling throughout his head and the lightbulb that is struggling to light itself. His make-up had rubbed off a bit, and the scar above his eyebrow is more visible, but Kido thinks it suited him and his abrupt personality.
All thoughts of this side of Kano are thrown away as soon as a hand reaches down and wraps around his neck, and the barrel of a sleek piston is pressed into the hair just above his ear.
"Well well," the man purrs as he tugs Kano to his feet, sliding his arm so that it settled nicely in between Kano's collarbone and chin, pressing up against his throat. "What do we have here."
Kido wants to look at the face of who holds the gun, of who holds Kano, but she can't because she is too busy focusing on Kano's surprised face, on his widened eyes and mouth that hangs open just barely and hands that claw at the arm of his captor. His muscles are too stiff, and he is slowly being choked, and a bullet is about to punch its way through his skull and into his brain and its going to splatter everywhere and Kido feels like Kano because she feels like she can't breathe either.
"Do tell," reaches her ears (It doesn't register until later when she is seated on some random chair with blood splattered upon her entire body, her entire being). "How you managed to free your hands, Deceiver."
Kano says something witty in return, or at least Kido assumes that he does because his lips are moving and a garbled sound is coming out of them, but the only warped words that she can understand are "henchmen" and "idiots". He wheezes a bit, hands scrabbling once again at the arm at his neck.
His answer, no matter how distorted it had been, apparently displeases the gunman, and he shows it with a soft, "Tch." That simple syllable is filled with contempt and sarcasm and a promise of pain and blood.
Kido finally brings herself to look at him.
He is tall, and wears black, baggy clothing over his skinny frame, and a pile of black hair is on top of his head, tied back at the nape of his neck. His fingers are long and pale, and a single one of them rests on the trigger of his gun. On his cheek is a tattoo of two black dots that are connected by a single line, and his eyes are a lifeless yellow.
She recognizes him in that moment; she remembers exactly where she had seen him before, even though he had been smaller and not as wicked and merely in a measly picture. She knows his name, and she knows that she can talk to him, hopefully convince him not to shoot. She knows that she has a chance at saving Kano.
But then Kuroha pulls the trigger.
AN: laughs i honestly did not intend for this chapter to end this way um? i was actually going to have the entire mekakushi dan meet up and save the day, but instead i had a wild seto appear, a brief mary sighting, and a bullet through kano's stupid face. oops.
and i'll go ahead and tell you that kano really is dead. like permanently dead. because this fic is in the angst category and i have to live up to that okay. AND THE REASON KUROHA IS ACTUALLY CALLED THAT WILL BE EXPLAINED NEXT CHAP I PROMISE. i don't really like the way i handled the whole konoha/kuroha/haruka thing but oh well. it's already done with and over.
um exams are approaching but after that is summer so hopefully the next chap will be up within a month? maybe? we can hope?