So… I just noticed that most of this case had been the interactions between the team, and they have been there for only like two days. Well then… oh, and to address some comments I've gotten, I do realize that Mai and Gene both shouldn't just be up and happy again after the miscarriage, but I don't think they'd be disabled by sorrow. Mai didn't actually carry the child, so would not have as much of a hard time as Gene would, but Gene has a better time of suppressing those disabling feelings. Don't worry your pretty little heads, the grief will be back soon enough.

Disclaimer: I own nothing~

Chapter 15: Story Telling

"Yasu, what did you find?" Naru asked, pinching the bridge of his nose as he worried at a patch of blood that had dried on his shirt with his other hand. He stood beside a Gene searching his new body for any anomalies that would tell him if he knew the girl or not. "Gene, would you stop groping yourself. That's not even your own body, I don't think she'd appreciate that. That's not helping with figuring out if you know her."

"Yes it is," Gene replied matter-of-factly, lifting the nightshirt to view his skinny, nearly anorexic stomach, poking gently at it. "You have no idea how hungry I am right now."

Naru inhaled the deepest breath he would manage and released it slowly. "If you know her, chances are you haven't seen her since we were seven or so. Puberty is a real thing, you know. It happens to everyone."

Gene pursed his lips, choosing to refrain from spewing the comment he'd been about to make. "Well, there has to be something on her body that hasn't changed. A birthmark. A scar. Something! I just have to find it." Without so much as a warning, he jerked out his sweats and the elastic of his underwear, staring down into their depths.

"Jesus, Gene, have some respect," Ayako shouted, slamming his hand back to his stomach.

"What? I've seen plenty of vaginas before. A new one makes no difference. And let me remind you that I was stuck in Mai's body for nearly four months, and I did take showers on my own like a big boy. Plus, I have kids. I'm pretty sure another vagina won't make a difference," he said, raising his eyebrows at her.

"Well, what if she doesn't want you to see her vagina? Ever think of that?" Ayako replied, standing and glaring at him.

Gene shrugged. "Well then, she's out of luck because I'm on a mission, and I will not be stopped."

"Yasu, your findings," Naru interjected before the pair could continue their argument, staring fixedly at the other male. He had no desire to be a part of the conversation or incidentally, hear any more.

"Right," Yasu and Gene said together, Gene dropping down onto his heels beside him, staring over his shoulder at the computer screen. "First, I found when the house was built, just to get a grounding of how long it's been in use. Come to find out, it's not all that old. Only about twenty years older than us, so it's been in use about forty years or so. It was shut down about seventeen years ago because of an incident concerning three of the orphans and the babies that had been housed in the nursery."

Gene and Naru stiffened together, muscles tightening along their arms and along their spines. Their eyes narrowed, and suddenly they seemed only to be half paying attention to Yasu's words.

"The use of the nursery was discontinued after the incident, and the home was opened to only those over three years old. The articles don't mention the orphans by name, and the details are scant at best. I went back through the records of the house." Yasu paused, adjusting his glasses on his nose. He cleared his throat and continued. "I, uh, I found the files of all the children brought here over the years. I… and, um, I found your files." He quieted, waiting for their responses.

Gene rubbed at his forehead. Naru simply stared out the window. "Alright, it's not like that's much of a surprise," he muttered, eyes distant, "We lived here from the time we were three until we were seven. I wouldn't be surprised if they still had our records in their filing cabinets. She never did like to use computers. And that article is wrong." The room was silent for a long moment, only the sound of paper towels and the spray bottle filling the room. "What else is there?"

Swallowing, Yasu continued. "You two were the last to be adopted from this home. Since then, children have been taken in, but none have ever left its walls. Apparently, no social workers are ever brought in to speak with the children about being adopted, and there have been a number of 'deaths' since the pair of you left."

Mai padded over, coming to stand beside Naru to listen in. "Why did you say 'deaths' like that?"

"Well, there's something weird about all of them. They have death certificates and the paperwork to go along with it, but the papers never say how the children died. They always say 'unknown causes' or 'natural causes', but nothing specific. Along with that, I didn't find even one coroner's report or any such document." Yasu paused, eyes going wide like he'd just realized something. "How many bodies are standing outside the door?"

Gene frowned. "Why do you want to know that?"

"Just…" Yasu frowned, glancing at his keyboard. "I just have a bad feeling."

Mai glanced over her shoulder just as Lin looked up at the monitors. They both went still. "Currently? …none," she said slowly, staring at the screen.

The others' heads snapped up. "What? What do you mean?"

"They're gone. Every single one of them," Lin said.

"That's… so not good," Monk whispered, tying off the plastic bag holding the bloodied napkins.

"No, no it's not," Masako, Gene and Naru muttered together.

After a pause, Yasu finally asked, "How many were there?"

"About twenty, maybe thirty," John replied.

Yasu nodded. "That was about how many were in the attic."

"Why did you want to know that?" Mai asked, looking back at him. Her mind was slowly playing catch up.

Rubbing at the side of his nose, pushing his glasses up and down, he muttered, "Because that's how many death certificates I found. All of them are recent. Within the past five years kind of recent. All of the certificates are for kids who would be around Ash's and Mai's age. The youngest, I think, is only sixteen."

"What about the children most recently taken in?" Naru asked, eyes still directed out the window, but fingers tangling with Mai's. The sky was grey, slowly lightening to oranges and pinks. Day break, he couldn't help but notice how new it looked.

Yasu tapped through a few documents on his computer, pulling up one with a date that only went back a month before. "The youngest among all of the children, not necessarily the one of the most recently taken in, is only six-years-old."

Mai stared at him in horror. "You're telling us that Ash fudges these kids' death certificates and then uses them for his own uses. He rips out their souls and takes their powers, and lets them slowly rot in his attic?"

Yasu nodded. "Basically."

"Point of clarification, those teens' bodies wouldn't have actually rotted. They would have aged, but not rotted. With an IV and soulless, they could theoretically live until their body's actually expiration date. Now, if a soul takes residence in said soulless body while the body's soul is still intact, that is when the rotting process will begin. Speaking of which, you'll probably find some issues with your body, maybe a little internal bleeding. Sorry about that. I didn't think your body would deteriorate so quickly." He gestured without looking towards the bloodstained floorboards. "That's what that was… mostly. I already explained this to someone. I don't remember who." The skin around his eyes tightened, and suddenly he was fighting off tears.

Pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, Mai was attempting to do the same. Sucking in a shaky breath, she asked, "When did Ash arrive here? I don't believe for a moment he simply stumbled over this place."

Clicking through the documents as quickly as was possible for his computer, Yasu finally lifted his finger from the mouse pad. "Here it is. He arrived with a number of children, and a few babies two years after Naru and Gene arrived. It says here that his parents were the social workers who brought the children here, but died soon after arriving with him and the others. It... doesn't say how."

Finally, Naru tore his eyes away from the rising sun, locking them with Gene's. "They didn't die so much as they were murdered."

"What? By who?" John asked, standing.

"If they were murdered, it wasn't brutal. I don't sense them at all," Masako interjected, glancing around the room, her sleeve pressed over her mouth.

Gene shook his head, staring down at his feet. "No, you wouldn't sense them. I don't know if you'd ever be able to sense them. I never could, not even in the seconds after they were first killed," he muttered despondently.

Closing his eyes, Naru's fingers tightened on his chin and in Mai's hand. When he opened them, they were haunted with unforgotten and terrifying images. "They were murdered more gruesomely than you can ever imagine. They were not the only ones."

"No, they weren't," Gene agreed, eyes once more locked with his twin's, pushing himself to his feet.

Naru nodded to an unasked question. He untangled his fingers from Mai's and gently pushed her towards John. "Since there's no immediate threat at the moment, you should go change and clean up. Take John and Gene with you. Gene needs a shower too. If anything happens, just call. The kids in the sleeping quarters will probably be there first to help you, but we'll be there. We'll always be there."

Smiling sadly, Mai nodded. "I know." She turned, leading the way out the door into the now empty hallway, followed by Gene and then by John.

All was silent, all eyes following the trio. Even after the door had closed, there was silence. Then, Naru finally broke it with a heavy sigh. "It was two years after we arrived. We were five by that time, and as you can expect, still did not fit in. Gene was friends with some of the others, but for the most part, we were alone. The others weren't like us and we weren't like the others, in more ways than one. When they came, it was with heavy hearts that Gene and I watched them walk up the steps. More children without parents or family members. More children who could never totally find a place in this world. More children who shared our unfortunate fate. That was the first time we met Ash Willows.

"When Mai first mentioned him, I was sure I'd never heard the name before. Truthfully, it wasn't until recently that I started putting it together that these weren't the first dealings I'd ever had with him." Naru paused, cupping his elbow and chin, turning his eyes back out the window to watch the sun. All eyes were trained on him, even Lin's, attracted by the oddity of a story-telling Naru. "When we first met him at dinner with the newcomers, he didn't seem so bad. As the days wore on though, and his parents continued to prolong the endless paperwork, we realized that he wasn't as saint-like as he made himself out to be. Neither were his parents.

"On more than one occasion, while playing a pointless game with the others, we'd find him torturing an animal in the woods or smashing his fist into a rock or tree until his knuckles were bruised and bloodied. It wasn't too hard to figure out that he wasn't all there, that some of his screws were more than a little loose.

"Over the two weeks before they were supposed to leave, we saw bruises appear everywhere, across every inch of his skin, and disappear under layers of make-up. One day he'd be walking perfectly fine, the next he would only be able to crawl short distances at a time. Our house matron never said anything, and it took us years after Mom and Dad –Luella and Martin Davis- adopted us to realize what had been happening.

"The day before they were supposed to leave, all the adults were busy. Ash found us huddled in a corner of the library, pouring over a book on psychics. He asked us if we wanted to play, and being the lonely children we were, we agreed. We followed him to the nursery. We didn't know what he'd been planning. It hadn't occurred to us that it could have been anything other than innocent. We didn't have anything near Mai's intuition."

Naru paused, collecting his thoughts, and tried to shove the images pouring into his mind back into their box, but the lock had broken. There seemed to be no way to stop them. "He went over to the first basinet and picked up an infant who could only have been a few weeks old, if that. He looked at us, a homicidal light in his eyes, before whispering to the crying baby. When the baby didn't quiet, his teeth gritted and he smashed its head into the floor. There was neither rhyme nor reason for the death, and we couldn't understand why anyone would do that. He went to the next basinet, and repeated the action, that time making sure he was greeted with the blood of the innocent. Gene and I both tried to stop him, yelling and screaming for him to stop, for someone to stop him. It wasn't until I was able to pull one child from him -a little girl nearly a year old, three months from her birthday- that someone ran in, checking to see what the noise was about.

"It was his parents and the matron who found us. His father moved in first, raising a fist like hitting him would actually solve the problem. The two women moved in behind him, meaning to restrain Ash. None of them ever had a chance. All at once, the three of them went stiff, and blood started pouring from every orifice. 'You'll never hurt me again,' Ash had growled before turning to the next basinet.

"That was when we knew we had to do something. Anything. Gene screamed, and all of his power and all of my power burst from me, flying everywhere, in every direction. The roof caved in, burying the rest of the infants, Ash, and the three people he'd murdered. We were sure he had been killed. When the police arrived, we were passed out, still protecting the girl I'd taken from Ash. They never found his body.

"A month after the incident, a new matron came to deal with us. Two years after, Gene and I were adopted. We never thought we'd ever see this place or him again." Naru went quiet, his eyes unfocussed.

"He's a monster," Ayako whispered, staring at her gloved hands, "We have to stop him."

The others nodded. "The only question now, is how do we stop him?" Monk asked. His question was only met with tense silence.

Well, there you go. That was… not where I meant this to go, but that's where it went. Anyways, you guys are going to hate the next chapter, I'm almost absolutely positive about that. I'm posting this a little early 'cause the last one was a little late. Hope it was adequate.