March 25th, 2023

Arya's POV:

I was drawn out of an uneasy, twitching sleep of luminous pastels and blood and knives and poison by the sharp, jittering ring of the bedside phone at the hotel. After some fumbling –and swearing when my hand hit the bulky landline base– I pulled the receiver off its hooks and set it to my ear.

"What?"

"Apologies for the late hour, but I may have a lead," Mr. Williamson replied, sounding a trifle manic. Blearily glancing over at the clock told me it was somewhere around 3 AM, though, so maybe he had a good reason for that. "Could you and your partner come down and meet me at my car? I'll be at the hotel in perhaps ten minutes."

Before I could press for more details, the phone clicked off, and I shrugged and yawned, setting it back down. Wriggling out of bed and hastily pulling on some jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, I pulled out my combat knife and strapped it to my hip, before setting off across the hallway to bang on Rex's door.

He opened it in a nightshirt and baggy pants, without hat or glasses or his red clips, bleary-eyed and yawning himself.

"Mnh?"

"Mr. Williamson says he's got a lead and wants to drive us there," I said. "Y'wanna get dressed and I'll slip a note to Kilik and the twins?"

"Sure," he mumbled, already looking more alert as he shuffled back into his tiny shoebox of a room. I went back into my own and dashed off a note on the hotel stationary, letting them know the time we were leaving and who we were going with, even if I didn't yet know where we were going to.

Grabbing some shoes on my way back to the door, I shoved them on midstep in the hallway, one after the other, before hastily stuffing the note beneath Kilik's door. Rex met me a few minutes later, earmuffs around his neck and gloves at the ready, and we hustled down to the lobby.

Given the rate of speed between us getting ourselves put together and heading down in the elevator, it wasn't a surprise to see Mr. Williamson already pacing feverishly in the lobby, all a-twitch with news to share with us.

"I think," he said, chivying us out into the icy winter night like a sheepdog as I belatedly stuffed my arms into the sleeves of my winter jacket. "-that I may have discovered something of a stalking ground for the killers."

Rex and I blinked into a slightly higher level of alertness.

"For real?" I asked, and Mr. Williamson nodded, practically buzzing with impatience as the two of us folded ourselves into his car. He hit the gas before either of us could get strapped in, and I snapped my buckle belatedly as we zoomed off down the street. "We in a hurry or somethin'?"

"I believe he uses the roof of this particular restaurant as a method of scouting out potential victims and/or meals," Mr. Williamson said, pressing his food harder on the pedal as we sped up. "Given the space of time between now and his last victim, he may be getting –jittery. We need to move fast if we're to catch him in the act."

"This restaurant got a name?" I asked, deeply suspicious.

"Lamb's End, if I remember correctly. Why?"

"So you might say it's the Silence of the Lambs?"

"I mean… I suppose…?"

Suspicions confirmed, I jumped when Rex elbowed me subtly.

"That's your 'I just connected dots and I'm about to ask you to trust me on something really weird' voice," he hissed in an undertone.

"What? I don't have a voice for that."

"You do too."

"Do not! You don't even know what dots I've connected. Er, if I've connected any."

"Try me."

"…ever heard the story of Hannibal Lecter?"

"No?"

"Yeah, see, there you go. Just, uh, trust me on this one: this Kishin's gonna be a smart and sneaky bastard."

***Time Skip***

We parked a fair distance away from the restaurant itself, not wanting to alert anybody that might be there. It not being a 24-hour joint, the lights were dark, and I wondered how we were gonna get in as we snuck up to the kitchen entrance near the dumpsters. The sour smell of old ketchup and rotting garbage warred for supremacy with the overwhelming aroma of damp cardboard from the recycle bin across the alley, making me wrinkle my nose.

Mr, Williamson, though, simply sorted through a fist-sized ring of keys and selected one, before unlocking the door.

"How the hell-" I whispered, but he shushed me.

"The police can requisition a key from any location they're involved in, if it's deemed necessary for the case," he muttered. "I've worked in this area a couple years ago; for a case of fraud, I think. Cooperate."

Rex and I exchanged glances and shrugged as the legal mumbo-jumbo washed over us.

After Mr. Williamson finished fiddling with the lock, he cautiously pushed open the door with his foot, but did not enter.

"Quickly and quietly, I think," he murmured to us. "Be on the lookout for anything suspicious, but try not to disturb anything if you can help it. I suggest splitting up, and since I've significantly less combat experience, I think one of you should stick with me."

This time our exchange of glances was slightly more dismayed.

"I can go solo," I suggested, not moving my gaze away from Rex's face. He nodded reluctant approval.

"Very good. Let's see if we can catch anything."

Giving the man his due credit, he entered first, with Rex and I trailing behind. I glanced around the alleyway before stepping into the kitchen area –or rather, the storage area. Boxes of boxes, or plastic bags, or napkins, or whatever else you needed to run a restaurant rose into the dark on both sides of us, and I could see a huge, bumpy pattern in the wall that probably marked a walk-in freezer.

It was a small space for all that, and after pushing open the door to the kitchen proper, Mr. Williamson nodded to me and then nodded off towards the stairs, which presumably led to either the roof or a dining area. Leaving him with Rex, I snuck off in that direction, making sure to ease my foot onto the outside of every step to prevent it creaking. In a situation like this, where Fire and Thunder's magic-sensing abilities weren't present, I was fully prepared to fire off the first spell I had to if a certain cannibalistic serial killer came around the next corner.

I wasn't operating with any particularly special knowledge, here: Hannibal Lecter was a bit too old-school for me, and I wasn't that big into horror to begin with. The stuff that was embedded in the cultural zeitgeist, sure, but as far as details went… nah. I knew he was a wicked smart serial killer who was also a cannibal and only ate people that offended him. That was it.

I tried to fit my meta-knowledge into what was going on now as I shuffled up the steps, spell mentally at the ready. Killing people who offended him, and the themed animal mutilations, and the whole theory about them representing the government or positions of authority in the criminal system…

The stairwell went up about two floors, and I had only crossed the first landing and was about to hit the next set of steps when a sudden series of very loud and –if one knew one had left their partner behind– very unpleasant noises echoed behind me. Something heavy hitting flesh, clattering metal, Mr. Williamson yelling-

Nope.

I took the stairs three at a time, bolting back down and through the hall and into the prep kitchen in under a minute as I then took in Rex, on the ground with his hat rolling a few feet away, and Mr. Williamson collapsed against a nearby counter, a long cut bleeding on his cheek. He had a knife in one hand –butcher knife, maybe, about twelve inches long and single-edged.

"We seem to have walked into something rather unpleasant," he wheezed at me, gesturing slightly with the bloodied tip of his knife towards the outer kitchen. "Bugger got away, but luckily I got my hands on this in time to give him something to remember us by."

I was more worried about Rex, who hadn't so much as twitched from where he lay on the floor. Sheathing my own combat knife, which I'd drawn mid-run, I got down on my knees beside him. Mindful of the stuff they'd warned us about in the spinals unit of first aid, I didn't try to roll him over, instead running my fingers lightly over his hair to try and find the injury as Mr. Williamson recovered himself and moved cautiously towards the doorway.

Rex was still breathing, which as an unmitigated relief, but that was pretty much all he was doing: when I pulled my hand away from his hair, my fingertips were dark and wet and sticky. It was too dark in here to tell much more than that, and I hissed nervously through my teeth. Head injuries were tricky, and there was only so much I could plausibly do with magic before someone noticed the difference between the before and after pics, as it were.

Maybe if I-

A blast of pain in my skull shorted out everything as my vision went white.

3rd Person POV:

The first thing Rex was cognizant of was a hollow, boxed-in rush of air. It was a sound that skittered fretfully off the close confines of-

He wasn't sure. He was on his side on something hard and flat, and his legs and neck were curled in like he was slightly cramped, with things pressing in against him from behind and at his head and at his feet and tangled against his front-

Cold. The sudden awareness of it sliced through him at the same time a splitting headache made itself known, and Rex's body shuddered against the floor –and something else– with a shivering wince. A pulsating pain radiated through his skull, spreading with every throb of his heartbeat, and he felt sick, his brain wobbling like gel.

Okay. Think. He had –someone had hit him. Like the Kishin Egg they were targeting was supposed to do. He was here and his skull hurt because someone had hit him over the back of the head.

Think. Physical inventory without movement, like the DWMA taught.

He was lying on his side inside a rectangular container, or what felt like one. It was bitterly cold, which might be because he was outdoors and might be because the room the box was in was unheated. He was missing his hat and his glasses; his ear (and most of his extremities) felt freezing from being pressed up against the ground for however long he'd been out; and his jaw was forced open around a gag that had been tied tightly around the back of his head. He was bound wrist and ankle by what felt like zip-ties, and there was another body spooned against him in front.

There were no sounds except the shallow raggedness of their breathing and the occasional rustle of movement whenever one of them shivered. No matter how hard he listened, he couldn't hear anything from outside of the box: not even the distant sounds of traffic or animals. Whatever they were inside, it had probably been sealed to prevent them shouting for help.

Rex cautiously slitted his eyes open, and was welcomed by nothing but darkness. Opening them to the fullest, he turned his head a little, trying to see if there were any lights or cracks. Nothing. Given the size of this box and the uneven striations in the walls –an unplugged freezer unit, maybe?

Right. Okay.

He took a deep breath, trying to choke down his panic. He was awake and aware –if not necessarily prepared to act– and that was infinitely better than being knocked unconscious and then getting his throat slit before he ever woke up. Which did beg the question –why had they been given time to recover –and potentially escape– before the Kishin Egg came back?

No, that's speculation. Don't waste valuable time on speculation.

Arya didn't seem to be awake yet, nor did she react when he grunted and did his best to nudge her. Right. Well, first-

With a wiggle of his shoulders, Rex craned his neck back and then held as still as he could, straining to produce a blade. Partial transformation was the first step on a Weapon's journey –learning how to entirely transform the first few times was rare– but learning enough control to produce a partial transformation of any size from any part of the body was another matter entirely.

Shaking with effort, he slowly managed to coax out a blade from the line of his shoulder, and turning his head, pulled it carefully across his cheek, cutting through the gag. Letting the transformation go with relief, he pushed the fabric out of his mouth with his tongue and cleared his throat.

"Arya?"

Still nothing, and when he leaned closer to her hair, he could smell blood.

Rex closed his eyes and took another deep breath, this time to force down the overwhelming fear rising in his gut. A DWMA student was only in trouble in they panicked. He was not panicking. The fact that whoever had attacked them had gotten the drop on a Witch and injured her, potentially grievously, could not make him panic.

He couldn't afford to let it.

Momentarily weighing his options on whether it was smarter to feign complete capture or go for full range of movement now, Rex decided on the latter and briefly transformed one of his arms, trying to keep it away from Arya's thighs and the small of her back as he sliced through the ties on his wrists. Resuming full human form, he gingerly ran his uppermost hand over her side, trying to figure out how they were oriented. She was also lying slightly curled, her arms pulled to the front of her –also probably bound, then– and when he felt up over her neck, he could detect her pulse, shallow but sure.

She was still alive, at least. Thank Death.

"Arya," he whispered, poking her fervently in the cheek. "Please wake up: we're kind of in trouble."

She didn't respond, but as he kept poking her, she did finally begin to stir a little. Relief flooded over Rex, briefly warming his shivering body, and he kept poking until he heard her groan a little and make a mumbled noise against the gag still in her mouth, her legs shifting.

"Arya?"

"…mmn…?"

"Oh thank Death," Rex breathed out, a brief wave of dizziness washing over him. He waited until it passed, leaving nausea swirling sour in the corners of his mouth. "Uh- did you remember what happened?"

"Mm-mm." Her gaze was still a little fuzzy, or at least so far as he could see in the dim light, but her voice was growing in strength and coherency.

"Me neither," Rex sighed, and then moved his hand, shifting it back to a blade. "Hang on a second, let me get your gag off."

Arya hummed in vague agreement, blinking groggily as she let him get to work and her eyes wandered over the case or box or whatever it was they were held in.

The first and only warning Rex got of her connecting the dots was Arya going rigid, and then she was flattening her body over his so fast that he nearly didn't shift his hand back to human in time to keep from slicing her cheek open. A trickle of warmth over his hand told Rex that he hadn't managed to avoid nicking her entirely.

"Arya, what-?!" he gasped as she squished him back, her feet kicking against the wall with a bang as she slanted herself atop him, pinning him back against the bottom corner edge of the box.

Rex paused as there was a moment of ringing silence, feeling her bodily press down against him.

To say that she was shaking really didn't do it justice. He'd been on walks outside Death City a few times, and seen the occasional hare or rabbit, their small pink noses a-thrum with constant movement; and that was what Arya felt like now –the tension in her body ratcheted so tight that he could feel every one of her muscles quivering where she was slanted forcibly against him. Her breathing was rabbit-quick, too, shallow huffs running together until it sounded like one long, panicked, stuttering exhale through her nose.

Rex was quite honestly at a loss. Arya had said she was eighteen, but who knew with Witches –they barely aged a year over each century. He'd seen some very-not-modern dresses in the back of her closet, and she'd fumbled sometimes with modern cooking appliances despite otherwise seeming frighteningly competent at making things from scratch.

She never backed down an inch and seemed have a knack for picking up new skills very quickly. Her intuition was terrifyingly sharp, and somewhere along the way he'd gotten so used to her somehow being able to accurately predict the ending of each situation that they found themselves in that the concept of her not being able to handle something with a roll of her shoulders and a tightening of her jaw was near-incomprehensible to Rex.

And yet, here it was.

Because she was definitely not handling this well.

He ran through his best theories, because she shouldn't be acting this way; if it was claustrophobia, she'd have been panicking from the start; and nothing had happened to drive her into this sudden terror…

Then he remembered what the school therapist had told him, way back at the beginning when they'd first been assigned to each other, even before EAT.

"About a year ago, Arya's mentor was possessed by a Sorcerer. Due to their relative isolation, he was able to torture her for many weeks before being discovered, and inflicted numerous, extensive physical injuries. She's been lucky enough to compartmentalize her trauma thus far, but be careful about any situations that may reawaken it: she could very easily backslide."

Knowing more than the therapist had, Rex was able to fill in a few more blanks. Rivalries between Witches were notoriously cutthroat, and magic-users were vicious by nature. Arya was more than strong enough to take care of herself, but being caught like this, being trapped, was probably awakening some deeply unpleasant memories, and she was now caught in the teeth of that secondhand terror.

In other words, her mind wasn't in the present, which was where they both desperately needed it.

"Arya," he said, trying to squeeze her shoulder, but she made a strangled noise and tried to cover his hand with her arm. She didn't get far, since both her wrists were still bound, but she certainly tried. "Okay, um… calm down. Please?"

That was weird. She was trying to… keep him under her? Stay between him and the lid? Stay between him and whatever was outside of the box?

… protect him?

Rex shook his head to clear his sudden flush and, experimentally, stopped trying to reach past her. Arya's trembling didn't decrease or increase, but at least she stopped squirming.

"Arya," he said again, trying to get through her apparent cloud of terror. "You're my partner. My meister. I'm here for you."

She didn't respond. He wasn't even sure if she was listening.

"Arya, please. I need you here with me." Despite his efforts at control, his voice began to shake a little as the cold and the claustrophobia and the fear squeezed in on him. "You always know what to do, and I need that right now."

Still nothing.

He gingerly prodded at the place in his mind where their soul bond was, unsure if he was about to be swamped by waves of the same terror. It seemed to work, though, a little –Arya shuddered like she was drowning, but one terrified eye rolled over to finally meet his.

Okay. Good. This was progress.

"A-are you okay…?" he croaked, perhaps stupidly, but he needed to say something to get her brain started again.

"No," Arya moaned, and even though she was looking at him and at least partially cognizant of where they were, her eyes and her mind still seemed a thousand miles away. "O-oh god, no..."

"Okay, just- um- just breathe," he tried, rubbing what little of her arm he could manage with her folding herself over him like this. "We're..."

...definitely not okay, but he couldn't exactly tell her that right now. Not when she looked like she was one heartbeat away from firing off the most destructive spells she knew in an attempt to peel this freezer unit off of them and not very concerned about what that would do to their decidedly squishier bodies.

"…we're together," he finished, somewhat lamely. "I- I trust you. We can figure this out. You've always been able to figure things out. Right?"

Her body rattled, and then she drew in a long, deep, shuddering breath that seemed to last twenty seconds.

"Figure this out," she said hoarsely at the end of it. "Right. Right."

He nodded as hard as he dared, not sure if it was the right move.

"Ah- we woke up in a freezer unit, alone. We're tied-up. Nobody here to gloat at us…" she mumbled, audibly putting her thoughts in order. "Resources?"

"My hat's gone, and so are my glasses."

"Can you –see?" Arya gasped. He didn't think that was the question she'd ask, but she seemed to be clawing more coherence back by the moment, so he let it happen.

"Right now, I can probably see as well as you can. I'm nearsighted," Rex explained, and then realizing that that might not be a term Witches knew, added "My problem's with seeing things in the distance; I can see stuff that's close by pretty well."

"Mmnh," Arya grunted, strangled, in a tone that vaguely indicated agreement. "Okay, so- so when we get outside, it's going to be a problem. Right. Yeah. Okay. We got hit with Mr. Williamson. Where's he?"

"…not here?" Rex said tentatively.

"Not in the box with us. Why not? It's a small box. Is that on purpose?" she muttered as if to herself, and then, louder, "Rex, can you get us out?"

"Um…"

He looked around, as futile as that was when it was this dark. Stretching a hand up, he hit the roof –or lid– almost immediately.

"Maybe?" he tried, and then curled his hand into a fist and, transforming it into a blade, punched up and out as best he could. There was a grating creak of sheering metal and who knew what else, and when he tugged his elbow back, he found that he had to wiggle his arm and tug futilely several times before he could wrench his blade free.

"Too thick?" Arya guessed glumly, and he nodded.

"I can't get enough room to slice with any force, and I don't think we can squirm around to get me to reach the seams or lock," he said. "I can punch us some slits close together, and maybe we can make a hole?"

"And then, what –push you out in Weapon form and have you try to pop the lock?" she replied. "Then what, though? If you're getting out, then you need to have a plan. You can't- you can't just run, he'll find you, he'll know-"

"We don't know if it's a him, or even if it's just one person," Rex said in alarm, squeezing her elbow. "We're okay, Arya. Focus. Breathe. I need you in the moment with me."

She nodded jerkily.

"I could- we could call Kilik and the others," she said. "If I use enough magic, Fire and Thunder will sense it, and they'll head right for us. Right?"

Rex had no idea if that was how Earth Shamans worked. Maybe?

"I guess…" he said cautiously, trying to keep his own mind on the here-and-now when cold and exhaustion and his splitting headache were all conspiring against him.

In her panic, Arya had said he – the Sorcerer who'd tortured her, maybe? In any other situation, he'd suspect her of maybe knowing the culprit and hiding it, but one look at her face or one moment feeling her quivering against him like this was enough to dismiss that notion. She hadn't been expecting this, and she did not want to be here.

"I can do that," she muttered, her eyes going glassy; although it thankfully seemed to be concentration, and not shock. "I can definitely do that. Fire noticed my magic spread at the table; if I sprinkle some breadcrumbs, I can lead them right to us…"

Rex struggled with his tongue for a moment about whether or not he should interrogate her about apparently having done magic around their fellow DWMA students, but finally let it go. They had other things to worry about right now.

"What do you need to do that?" he asked instead. Focus on the issue at hand, split it into smaller problems…

"I need- I can't just do a magic EMP, who knows what that'd attract," she continued to mutter, closing her eyes and apparently struggling just as hard as he was to focus. "I need… I don't know where I am –where we are– so I need to… I need to find the Thames. I can orient myself with that. If I know where we are relative to them I can… I can lay strings down in their direction. Set up magic pulses, make it seem like they stumbled across a hot trail."

"Okay," Rex said encouragingly, even if half of that made absolutely no sense to him. If it made sense to a Witch, then that would have to be enough. "So what do you need me to do?"

"It's- I'm going to need to do an astral projection… or at least as much of one as I can manage," she mumbled, her arm twitching like she had tried to draw a hand down her face. "I need- I won't be in my body, so I'll be helpless. I need you to watch my back."

"Which means once I punch a hole and get through, I don't pop the lock," he said slowly. "I stand guard until Kilik and his partners get here."

"Yeah… yeah."

"If we're in the Kishin Egg's lair, can you sense if there's anyone else here?" he asked, voicing a worry that had been creeping up on him from the moment he regained consciousness.

She blinked, but then squinted her eyes shut and… loosened, for a second. It was hard to describe, but her muscles went slack in a way that mere forced relaxation couldn't account for as Arya did whatever she had to do to try and sense life forces or souls with her magic.

"I can't feel anyone out there," she said at length, stiffening up again. "I think we're the only ones in the building."

That made things easier, and Rex consciously shut down any thoughts or speculations of why they were the only living bodies Arya could sense in the area. They were alone: this meant he wouldn't have to stray too far from this crate looking for people to rescue.

"Okay," he said, and nudged her. "Ready, then?"

She nodded as best she could under the circumstances, unwilling to stir her head injury. He transformed his arm and punched up again, aiming next to the slit he'd already cut into the roof or lid above them. Sinking his blade wrist-deep into layers of steel and insulation material, he wriggled and pried with his arm, before yanking it free and trying again.

Since they were only working for enough space to shove his sword form through, it was the work of a mere few minutes before he'd gotten enough stabs to create a workable gap, and he slotted his arm up carefully against the hole as Arya set a hand on his ribs. As he transformed, she shoved, pushing him out as his form warped and shifted in length, clearing the gap and lid and hastily re-transforming atop the freezer unit before he slid back down into it.

"Got it," he said, and slapped the flat of his hand twice against the top of the unit as it made a hollow banging noise. "Arya, you're good to start."

"M'kay," her voice echoed oddly from beneath, before she fell silent.

Since the building was apparently empty, Rex took the time to look around the room they were in as he remained kneeling atop the box, not willing to risk his head injury by moving around too much.

It seemed like they were in some kind of industrial building: bare walls, concrete floor, and completely unheated. There was a strip of fluorescent white lights across the ceiling, and a grey horizontal blur of a steel walkway or mezzanine, although at this distance and without his glasses he couldn't tell whether it had rails or not. There were several more freezer units around the room, and a large metal kitchen table in the center. It was bare now, and seemed clean enough, but it gave him the shudders, nevertheless.

Looking around even more, he noticed a doorway that seemed to lead deeper into the building on their right, opposite the walkway spanning the upper left. That made him nervous, and he wondered if he'd be up to pushing one of the boxes across it, perhaps, to give them more security.

No. No; he had something that was threatening to be a concussion at best, and his meister was essentially out of commission. Rex would fight or move if he absolutely had to, but otherwise it was in both of their best interests for him to wait quietly and try to recover as best he could.

So thinking, he palmed the lid and swung his legs to fold neatly beneath him, before slowly and cautiously leaning back to rest his weight against the wall behind the freezer unit. Staying tensely on guard would do both him and Arya no good if all that tension locked his muscles in place: if he was quiet, he should be able to hear and see anyone coming before they showed up.

Tucking his hands under his armpit to conserve heat, Rex hunched in tightly on himself and waited. He wasn't sure how Arya intended to find the river –or what good it would do her if she did– but he had to assume she had some kind of workable plan. She usually did, even if it often made absolutely no sense until they suddenly got the result she was waiting for.

Measuring time in an empty room was hard. Measuring time in an empty room while fending off either hypothermia or frostbite or both was worse. Measuring time in an empty room while doing all of that and dealing with a head injury that throbbed dizziness and nausea through him with every heartbeat was an absolute pain: even so, he guesstimated it was about ten or twenty minutes before he heard a rattle and thud from deeper in the building.

"Arya?" he whispered, trying to nudge their soul bond. He got no response, which he assumed meant that she was still trying to find and bring Kilik and the others back here.

Okay. Fine. No problem. It was a Weapon's duty to always be ready to die for their meister, and even if his meister was a Witch that didn't make his duty any less clear.

Actually, if she wasn't a Witch, we'd be even more screwed than we already are…

He unfolded his arms and leaned forward: his head throbbed as the world swam warningly, but Rex no longer had the luxury of sitting still. He slipped off the freezer unit and took a stance between it and the interior door, partially transforming his arm to guard against-

"Mr. Williamson?!"

The older man looked as if he hadn't slept at all: his clothes and hair were disheveled, and there were dark shadows beneath his eyes and a cut on one cheek. He stopped dead as he saw Rex standing at bay, several versions of shock flickering across his face before his expression settled on relief.

"What happened?" he asked, starting forward.

"I was gonna ask you," Rex mumbled, lowering his arm. Then he paused as a niggling suspicion suddenly tugged on the back of his mind, his stance freezing before it could fully relax. "How did you find us?"

"Got lucky," Mr. Williamson said as he stopped a respectful distance away, rubbing his hands and giving a sheepish smirk. "They fished the Man With The Magic Eye out of the river, and his, er, testimony led us straight here. Not much of a testimony if it was shouted insults while he fled pursuit, but even so…"

Arya said he had nothing to do with this, that nagging little suspicion said, getting louder by the moment. Arya said he was in Witch prison until a few days before we were set on the case. She said he was a stupid idiot with not near enough finesse to pull thing kind of thing off.

"What happened at the restaurant?" he asked, adjusting his feet a little as subtly as he could.

"I'm afraid our culprit caught us by surprise," Mr. Williamson replied. "I managed to fend him off with a knife I snatched –for a bit, at least, until he knocked me out. He must've had his hands full in dragging the two of you off, which was why I was left at the scene."

"Or he was you," Rex said before his brain could consult with his mouth, raising his arm again as Mr. Williamson's face went blank. Figuring he'd already royally stuck his foot in and may as well preserve momentum, he continued recklessly "Multiple people or an inside job –wasn't that the theory? And you have access to all of the security systems that got bypassed. You're familiar with the hunting club."

And something you said or did in the car ride to the restaurant made Arya twitch, Rex added to himself. Something that made her do that thing where she's suddenly added up a bunch of pieces at once and is about to use it.

"Don't be ridiculous," Mr. Williamson scoffed, gesturing to the room. "And in any case, this is a conversation that ought not to take place here!"

"If you're worried about getting attacked again, then you should've brought our other team," Rex said as the nagging suspicion became a scream of urgency. He slid his foot back, both bracing himself up and leaning away from the older man. "But you didn't, did you? You wanted to take care of this alone."

That explained the sudden tearing urgency when he'd hustled them out the door to the restaurant, and why it'd been just them and not the others, and why Mr. Williamson had made sure to split them up when they went inside. Arya had suggested that he was the culprit and controlling the situation from the inside, but they'd both laughed it off as a joke.

Rex wasn't laughing now, as Mr. Williamson met his eyes and saw the conviction therein.

"This was you," Rex said firmly. "You're the one killing and eating people, and you decoyed me and Arya out to that restaurant because you felt we were getting too close to finding an answer. What I don't get… is why? Why start all this in the first place?"

It wasn't an entirely stupid question: the older man didn't look armed, but Rex was in very poor condition for a fight, and Arya was still doing her magic thing. The longer he kept him distracted, kept him talking, the better Rex's chances would be.

"Why should that matter?" Mr. Williamson scoffed, curling his lip. "If you're oh-so-sure I've done it, why are you bothering to ask about motive in the first place?"

Rex frantically searched for something to articulate.

"Even if you're not a police officer, y-you're still someone who protects the law-"

"Exactly!" Mr. Williamson spat, the sudden venom making Rex take an involuntary step back. "I run myself ragged trying to close up security systems, guide this, improve that, make a bunch of idiots' lives a little safer, and that prat Leo waltzes in, ruins a few livelihoods, and gets lauded for it in the papers! Every hit he made was treated like a damn celebratory novel in the articles, and then he'd strut around in his day job so smug, so sure that we could never pin anything on him! And he was right!"

Rex made a vague conciliatory noise, not moving.

"So I fixed him. I fixed him, and who cares what happened then; he was finally out of my hair. I cut his thieving fingers off and I cut him up to show everyone exactly how wrong he was inside and I figured –what's the harm? Witches do it all the time. It shouldn't matter."

If he was talking about eating the fingers afterwards, Rex sincerely hoped not. It would make living with Arya even more awkward than it already was.

"And I need –I needed to be better. To do better. I needed those clever fingers and so if I made them mine and put them to use then it's not anyone's damn business but my own!"

Rex's eyes flicked to Mr. Williamson's fingers as the man ran them agitatedly though his disheveled hair, and he wasn't sure if it was more creepy or less creepy that there were no stitch marks. Consuming the parts of the victim that symbolized their skills… so he expected to gain Rolland Leo's dexterity from eating his fingers? It was a logical idea, Rex supposed –disturbing and fucked-up and nonsensical logic, but logic nonetheless.

"And so Isaac Wynne found out about it, then?" he asked tentatively, and Mr. Williamson let out a bitter scoff-laugh, still digging his hands into his hair.

"Him? He couldn't find his arse with both hands and an atlas. He just –always hovering and scraping and scoffing and patronizing, when everyone inside the department and out of it knew he was taking bribes!"

His eyes snapped to glare at Rex directly as he snarled, and Rex raised his bladed arm impulsively as the man started forward. Mr. Williamson stopped, his hands clenching as they lowered to his sides.

"He was a slippery snake who kept talking his way out of trouble whenever someone brought it up the chain, and every time I worked anything even tangentially to do with him, he kept hovering around like a thundercloud, getting in everyone's way and pompously insisting that he was doing us all a favor," he spat. "I did him a favor –I did us all a favor killing him! It was- years of frustration that man cost me, and I won't apologize for wanting to take a piece out of his hide afterwards!"

"Mm-mm?" Rex prompted nervously, lips pressed tight together. He felt like if he moved the slightest bit, even by a hair, he'd ignite an explosion.

"Troy Darren –everyone always kicks up a fuss when the politicians die, true, but I had to. I had to," Mr. Williamson continued, quieting a little. Even more than the slightly-spittle-flecked ranting, this ability to force himself into a calm and rational mood terrified Rex. "What he was doing –he was smart, but he had all the wrong ideas. Improving the wrong things. He didn't understand the way things work, not way I do. He's not had to slave over it for years; he was just doing what he thought he should to keep his seat. You understand, I'm sure? Progress… progress sometimes requires cutting out a cancer. You of all people should know that; the DWMA trims the excess all the time."

Serial killers mentally deteriorate with time, Rex silently replied, not saying it aloud. The first two murders… well, they were hardly the work of a rational man, but they had a clear and understandable motives. Years of festering grudges had exploded into one moment of fury.

Troy Darren, though… it seemed like he had been killed because –real or imagined– he'd potentially threatened Mr. Williamson's career-long efforts at restoring order within a certain section of London. The strength of his excuses for murder was weakening.

"Was Alysa Morley a mistake, then?" he tried. "You didn't mean it… you just got angry…?"

"Of course I meant it," Mr. Williamson retorted immediately, his voice firm and crisp. "I was beginning to catch attention –or rather, my suspected alternate self was. I needed something… fresh. New. Out of character. A different sort of victim entirely. I won't deny that I found her attractive, but she never gave me anything but teasing invitations. Still, that made it easy enough to find a different use for her; luring her off to be harvested was child's play. Her own fault for being too coy, really."

Further deterioration: killing someone at least in part because she rejected him. Rex wasn't surprised about that, especially when he'd heard somewhere that eating a human brain could have some extremely nasty side effects. If Mr. Williamson had eaten the politician's head, then his ability to think might've been even more compromised than Rex had initially assumed.

"Elwood Ethan was… more of a mistake, I will admit," Mr. Williamson continued, and reaching up, smoothed back his hair and gently adjusted his clothes. "It was more of a wrong place and wrong time than anything else, but… still. He wouldn't want his wisdom to go to waste, would he? I only did what was right to salvage the situation."

And thus murder for a long-held grudge went on to become murder for a perceived threat and then murder for a personal slight and finally murder without any real cause. Classic mental deterioration in action. Rex shuddered.

"And so you ate his ears and eyelids because…?!"

"Weren't you listening at all?" Mr. Williamson scoffed, eyeballing him. "I needed those parts. I needed his wisdom and her beauty and his brains and his silver tongue and his skills because I needed to be better. I'm already on top of my game; imagine the good I could do now that I've finally cleared away some of the impediments."

Oh, so he's completely insane. Okay.

"And so, what, you were planning to eat us to get some of the DWMA's combat skills? It doesn't work like that, you know," Rex said aloud, shifting nervously to keep his blade between him and the older man.

"Don't be absurd," Mr. Williamson replied. "Become a Weapon? Oh, no. No, I merely meant to create a little bit of thinking space. Did you think it was a coincidence –or your own hardihood, maybe– that you're up and walking now, instead of strung up like a sheep with your throats already slit?"

"Er," Rex said, because he hadn't actually thought about it. And if he had, he would've assumed Arya had done something to heal them.

"The two of you are clearly willing to bend rules to get results. As a fellow, mmm, creative problem solver, I wanted to have a bit of a chat," Mr. Williamson continued, striding over to what Rex strongly suspected was a dissection table. "Perhaps we might come to some arrangement; something in the nature of you reporting that you heroically killed your targets at the last moment, and your teams packing back off to the DWMA with a well-done and a pat on the back from the rest of us."

Rex's mouth swung open and shut a few times in the ensuing expectant silence.

"You literally had us tied up and gagged in a box!" he finally spluttered. "You took my glasses –you took our winter clothes– you took all our spare weapons, and I'm supposed to think that this isn't just your Plan B after you found out that we woke up before you could get to the rest of it?!"

"You fail to consider the fact that I had to account for the option where you did not agree to be reasonable," Mr. Williamson said smoothly, pulling a long butcher's knife out from under the table. Rex automatically backed a step away, then firmed.

"Serial killer Michael Williamson, in accordance with DWMA law, your soul is mine," he announced, brandishing his blade-arm.

"You can barely stand straight, boy, and with all the blinking you're doing, I have to assume your glasses weren't for show," Mr. Williamson responded calmly, taking a step forward.

"I'm standing between you and my meister," Rex snapped, moving to block the man's view of the freezer unit they'd been trapped in. "Come clean and this doesn't have to end with us –with me– killing you."

"It won't." Another step, and the butcher knife held with the easy confidence of long practice. "Your meister is being quiet, isn't she? I do hope that head wound hasn't caused anything premature."

"I'm warning you-"

"Weapons aren't known for standing without their meisters, are they?" Mr. Williamson asked over Rex's voice, continuing that leisurely prowl. "It's a fine show of loyalty, and all, but I do wonder if this is how you want to spend your last moments."

"Stay back-"

"Because really…"

Rex's lips tightened, and he stepped forward. In one swift movement, he batted aside the edge of that knife as it swung and sliced his other arm horizontally.

Mr. Williamson's head tumbled neatly to the ground a moment later, severed in a single flash. For a second, blood gushed from the stump, before both head and falling body swelled and burst in spiraling hoops of black, which then condensed and spun into the floating red wisp of a corrupted soul.

Rex grimaced and wiped some of the speckles of blood off his face with one hand.

"Farsighted, not nearsighted," he grumbled, shaking his fingers out. "And I fought without a meister for a long time."

***Time Skip***

Arya was quiet even after he'd broken her out and explained about the culprit, and they'd gone to sit and wait on the curb together for Kilik and the twins. Rex did most of the explaining, and got a wordless, approving eyebrow-lift and a fistbump from Kilik out of it –as well as Fire transforming back into a human shape and cuddling across both he and Arya's laps in a successful effort to warm them up.

Kilik went with Lightning to a payphone to call an ambulance for them and a police crew to start picking over the crime scene, which Rex got pulled off to join after they assessed his head injury and deemed it not serious enough to stop him.

Once all the fuss was over, and Kilik and the twins were on the phone to call in their successful mission, Rex wandered over to rejoin Arya, who was perched glumly on the back edge of the open ambulance, with gauze bandages wound rakishly around her skull to match his own.

He placed both hands on the bed of the ambulance and turned, hefting himself up to sit beside her. Someone had been kind enough to give him a spare pair of glasses, even if they weren't his exact prescription, and someone else had been even kinder and given him a sterile wipe to clean the blood off his face. Rex removed the former and polished the lenses on his shirt for a moment, before replacing them.

"So," he began when Arya still didn't say anything. "You… have a problem with being trapped?"

"Who doesn't?" she grumbled, her voice still a little hoarse.

"Most people don't freak out bad enough to disassociate. Or flashback. Or –whatever that was."

There was another long silence, before she drew in a deep breath through her nose.

"It was that and the cannibalism thing, okay?" she said at last. "I don't –the school therapist told you about my teacher and the possession thing, right?"

"Mm-hm."

"I censored that shit. It wasn't just the torture –that guy was a cannibal too, and he c-cut up one it my friends for ingredients while she was still alive; hacked her apart right in front of me and told me to my fucking face I was next."

She shuddered viscerally.

"And I just –the only reason I survived that was because I was lucky. I was just damn lucky. It wasn't that I was smart, or I was strong, or, or fucking positioned well: he was smacking me around like a cat with a mouse because he knew I wasn't good enough to escape on my own and wanted to have some fun before he killed me. That was it. That was all."

Her voice nearly broke apart into a sob as the words poured out, and without consultation Rex put his arm around her shoulders. Because hearing this, Death, how could he not? His skin was crawling and he hadn't even experienced it.

"And I got away because I had other friends and I was lucky." She spat the word like a sudden poison, before her voice sank into a low and bitter monotone again. "I was helpless. I couldn't do anything. I tried and I tried and I tried but nothing I fucking did got me out of there."

"So waking up trapped like we did… brought back some bad memories," Rex tried carefully. She nodded and gave a jagged shrug beneath his arm.

"I've worked damn hard not to ever be that helpless again," Arya said after a moment, clenching her fists as her eyes suddenly blazed. "I'm never going to rely on luck to get me out of a problem again. I'll be strong enough, or smart enough, or –whatever enough that I can get out of it on my own. I won't ever be like that again. I won't let it happen. I won't."

Rex hummed wordlessly.

Won't, or can't? He thought. Still, this was… something to unpack.

Okay, a lot to unpack, really.

Relying on instinct to give him time to think, he shuffled that half-inch closer, so that they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, and squeezed his arm around her. That felt… correct. She needed comfort, and hugs were physical comfort, so that was something, right?

"I'll help you with that," he said after a few seconds. "Being strong, I mean."

She tilted her head slightly, looking at him sidelong in a way that invited further explanation.

"We're partners," Rex said, stressing the word for what felt like the thousandth time. "And I know you've got your- your family business stuff to take care of, but we're partners for right now, and we'll be partners until you get that done. And our job is to make each other stronger."

She blinked at him for a second, and then glanced ahead again. He watched several thoughts flickering across her eyes, ending in a final calculation and acceptance.

"…yeah," she said, and the pressure against his side increased a little as she leaned into him –just barely, but leaning into him for support all the same. "Yeah, I guess so."

They sat like that for a few minutes, Rex not daring to move for fear of disturbing her. Between the head injury and her current fragile emotional state, she needed more than just a moment of rest.

"I think we should take five for, like, a week or so after this mission," Arya said after a bit, either paralleling his thoughts or feeling his mood through their tenuous soul bond. Perhaps even a mix of both. "Catch up on schoolwork, and just… just take a break from this stuff for a bit."

Avoidance, Rex thought, and then quickly stepped on said thought. Given how tightly Arya was wound up about this sort of thing –how stubbornly she refused to hand out any information for fear it would become a weakness– he should probably be grateful she'd even told him about this to begin with.

"Sure," he said. "Sounds nice."

11.26 AM, USA Central Time

10-Hannibal Lecter:

Hannibal Lecter, otherwise known as Hannibal the Cannibal, is a fictional serial killer infamous for being a cold, calculating genius (and cannibal), brilliantly persuasive, featured in the books Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, which have been turned into film and TV adaptions of various sorts. I have seen neither of these in any medium, but the movie-monsters section of my monster books and my sibling who's watched the Hannibal TV show both assure me that he's really something.