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Summary: Michael is chaffing more than usual in the confines of the STN-J offices, so Sakaki decides he needs a day outside. But when the consequences come down on their heads, will the day be worth the price?
Sticky Notes
By Swiss Army Knife
It had been a drawn-out hunt, more challenging to their endurance than threatening to their lives. The witch had been a clairvoyant under the hysterical delusion that she was receiving messages from some kind of god. Her senses had gone haywire after a further psychotic break caused her to begin lashing out. After that, her hyperesthesia had made it difficult to track her; she ran from them, out of her mind with fear and overwhelmed with the images she couldn’t stop.
When they’d finally found her the tantrum she’d thrown had destroyed a street and left a building on fire. Immediately afterward she had melted down, curling fatally and sobbing until they put her down with the orbo.
Disheartened and exhausted, the team had turned her over to the Factory and returned to STN-J.
Amon checked over his weapon with a meticulous grace, not having even removed his long coat. Doujima simply fell into the nearest chair, closing her eyes briefly until a diligent office worker offered her a mug of steaming coffee.
“Thanks,” she murmured, and returned Michael’s grin when she caught his eye.
“For I while, I thought you’d never get back,” he teased, and was rewarded with a protruding pink tongue.
Sakaki, perhaps inevitably, had sustained injury. Nothing significant this time, thankfully, but he had received a rather deep gouge in his left arm that warranted stitches. Knowing he would leave it untended, Kurasuma had forced the boy to sit and let her deal with it immediately.
Feeling a pang of pity, Michael winced sympathetically. Black luck followed after the unfortunate young hunter like a kitten after yarn. Left to its own devises, the small wound would probably fester and he’d be on his death bed in a week. And Sakaki was a terrible patient.
He was proving it now as he fought his nurse, flinching dramatically and barking at her to leave him alone, he was fine. Karasuma pinched her partner hard in response, telling him to stop the twitching or take a needle through more than just skin. He sunk sullenly onto the stool after that, face haggard and ill-tempered, but also – Michael thought – very tired. They all looked tired.
Robin was stretching catlike across the room, her skin pale in the dim light from a nearby desk. Her bound honey-touched hair seemed loose and even a little matted. “We’re finished then,” she said in her smooth, uninflected voice. It was obvious she was ready to go home.
Michael felt a pang, a familiar hook in his gut, realizing it. Always, it was difficult to watch them leave. Irrational though it was, there was a feeling of abandonment that always haunted him briefly, the breath of a little ghost on his neck to remind him what he was.
-slave-
“I’m fine, Kurasuma,” Sakaki jerked a little, trying to free himself. He was pulling his sleeve down already over the bone-white bandage, whipping it from memory. Having regained his feet, he snatched up his jacket and strode towards the exit. But before he could reach it a dark boot stepped quietly in his path before the door. An impassable wall, or the wrath of God.
Amon loomed: A month’s worth of field documentation was due. Sakaki was not to set foot out of STN-J until they were completed and filed.
Of course the shaggy-haired rookie had scowled and fussed, but eventually he went to hunch irritably into his chair to address the reports. Both he and his superior knew it was a mere obligatory show of defiance. Sakaki would follow Amon into hell, nevermind a labyrinth of paperwork.
Michael was always secretly pleased with recalcitrant teen’s habitual procrastination, since it inevitably meant he would stay overnight. It made the darkness less lonely, and sometimes the hunter could even be coaxed into taking a break to watch a movie or talk softly for a while as the hours stretched grey and thin in the deep of early morning.
He watched the others file out with much less trepidation, unbothered even when the overheads went out, leaving the room bathed only in the surreal blue haze of hibernating computer screens and the lone orange desk light by Sakaki’s hand.
“Tough night?” the techie tried to open up conversation neutrally.
The older boy grunted, but his cross expression had broken now that they were alone. He rubbed his face tiredly with both hands and sighed, “I hate when they end like that. Tears. I hate when they’re women.”
Or children. Or innocents. The potentials were always the hardest, and the drawn-to-the-end-of-themselves mad. It was a pathologically ignored reality that the Factory actually cleaned up as many suicides as hunts.
Sympathetically, Michael nodded. He watched most of their hunts remotely, but even with the distance they sometimes got to him. He couldn’t imagine being there in person, being forced to do the job they did.
Sakaki liked it though; he was proud of his job. “You did well,” the teen offered, and he was sincere.
A wry snort. “Neverminding the injury, you mean.”
“Well,” Michael felt his lips curl upward. “It hardly counts, being you.”
This was where Doujima would have presented her tongue again, but Sakaki just glared. It amounted to about he same thing.
“That’s right. Feeble Sakaki trips over his bootlaces into the nearest wall or ditch,” the hunter gripped sarcastically. There was a genuine lowness to his voice, however, a grain of insecurity showing through the armor. His malignant fatefulness and the overwhelming talent of his teammates had done damage to his self esteem over time, though he tried to hide it. “And what did you do while I was off proving my incompetence?”
“Sat here,” Michael responded truthfully. And all at once the gloom was back on him, the ghost on his shoulder. He looked around at the shadows and the corners of the room, so familiar, all etched into his brain like his own skin and scars. He’d barely been out of this room in three years.
Sensing his pain, Sakaki shifted. He had compassionate eyes when he focused his energy on the emotion, and they were bright with it now. “You’ve seemed…I dunno, unhappy lately,” he said.
Unhappy? “I can’t imagine why on earth I’d be unhappy,” Michael snapped without thinking. His gut twisted suddenly, and gorge rose in his throat. Acidic, his words rose up too, sharp and unkind, “Perhaps its because I’m trapped in here while you all go out and live. Perhaps its because I’m wallowing here without a life, alone while you can all go and –”
He wasn’t unhappy. No. Always, always, he was just on the verge of despairing.
“Michael,” his friend began, but the teen interrupted him.
“I…it’s nothing, Haruto. I’m sorry I said those things. I’ve just been restless lately.” He searched deep inside for something that might have passed for a grin if only it weren’t so mangled by despondency. “I guess I get a little jealous sometimes of the role the rest of the team plays. I don’t think I’d enjoy the excitement, but at least it’s outside. At least it isn’t here.”
He fell quiet after that admission. When he looked up it was into the stiffened face of his friend, pressed into an expression that Michael didn’t understand. But then the other turned away, abandoning his computer, and went to take up sentinel by the window.
Sakaki paced when he was troubled, an action which usually wound him up like a spring instead of relieving tension, galvanizing him to – often – reckless action. Michael felt a little apprehension watching him prowl like that.
He reassumed typing to break the strangely pervading demi-silence that the room had fallen into, but his attention was divided. The screen burned into his retinas, but the little growls and huffs of breath beneath the unwavering tempo of Sakaki’s footfalls stayed in his ears, distracting him.
When they suddenly quieted long minutes later, the younger man looked up.
“Michael,” the voice of the rookie hunter floated phantom-like from his position in front of the heavy iron framed window. The moonlight covered him like a sheen, draping like a specter over his shoulder and setting his hair silvery and glowing so that it was like a halo around his head. It was an eerie but beautiful thing, offset only by the look of fierce resolution on his face.
The fair-haired youth felt a slight shudder pass through his skin seeing his friend so still. Sakaki didn’t stand still. With him one could always expect movement, action. And standing there, Michael could almost see the kinetic energy building behind his eyes.
“What are you thinking?” he dared to ask.
Violet eyes bore through the night and straight into his heart. They were animalistic, fierce, and unequivocally resolved. Frightening even. Sakaki said, “This is an intervention.”
“He threatened my life,” the notes went on. One could almost see Michael’s dramatic pout. Then Sakaki, “In any case, we’ll be back by eleven, mommy.”
“This was so not my idea.” Michael.
“I lead him away at gunpoint. So if you want to beat the crap out of somebody, Zaizen, it might as well be me.” Sakaki, out.
For a long moment the group merely stood around the bundle of consoles looking grave. Doujima was tugging on a stray tuff of hair by her ear, eyes wide. The elder members of their team, however, had twin expressions of doom.
“This is inescapably bad, isn’t it?” Karasuma murmured aloud.
Amon didn’t even bother to answer, but stripped away the yellow scrap that contained Sakaki’s brazen slur towards their administrator. He read it again and sighed, slipping it between his fingers to tear it into pieces. The rest he had no choice but to deliver to Zaizen.
He supposed that it was his own pathology that made him feel it should be hard; after all, people walked in and out of the offices every day. Sakaki did. But Michael never had. In was the only path he’d ever taken, and it deeply shook him how his friend was able to take him by the elbow and lead him down the elevator and into the lobby unchallenged by a soul. Soon he could see grated exit, framed in the glow of the outside world.
“Crap,” he paused to take a panting breath, to grip his bangs in a tangle of fingers. They were damp and he was shaking.
Michael wasn’t prepared to step out through those bars. But a steady, almost painfully firm grip was against his shoulder, pressing him down and definitely forward. It was reassuring at the same time it was merciless, and even in his fear he allowed himself to be guided by it. Out the doors.
In a way it was like coming out of a womb.
The vivacity of every shade and hue stunned him, undimmed by looming walls or pallid, colorless carpet. One thousand smells came upon a sudden wind – a breeze inartificial, ductless. And in an almost cloudless sky, he found the morning sun.
The sun. It was radiant, brighter than any florescent, than any bulb or screen. It hit Michael’s eyes in a dazzle and became a blanket, so white that he was blind. He swayed, lightheaded from the sudden exposure, but Sakaki caught his arm before he could topple. He waited patiently, close beside the younger man, steadying him until he was sure footed again.
Embarrassed, Michael pulled away as soon was he was able. Turning his back, he rested his hands against the forbidding wrought iron gate before the building. “Sitting around all day, never moving beyond two rooms…it doesn’t give you a lot of exercise,” Michael forced a bitter laugh, but when he looked up his friend wasn’t smiling.
“Lets get out of here,” Sakaki said quietly instead. “It’s damn depressing near this place.”
The technology expert was surprised when he wasn’t immediately lead around to retrieve Sakaki’s motorcycle. So many times he had watched the hunter speed away on it, towards a mission or to wherever he called home. He’d seen the other’s apartment in the background of the com screen a few times, but really he knew very little about the older boy’s life outside of STN-J. Except that he really loved that bike.
“I didn’t ride in yesterday,” Sakaki shrugged when he mentioned it. “Seeing your face if I give you a ride would almost be worth the trouble going to get it, but for that you need to walk.”
And they did walk, away from Solomon and that troubled, smoky brick building. Michael was afraid to look back at it as they strode away, though he found himself briefly wondering if he could find his faceless window high on its facade. He wondered if it resembled a prison from out here, but Sakaki was dragging him onward before he could dwell on it.
“Welcome to the world,” the rookie hunter said, sort of gruff and distracted as could be his way. “Or maybe it would be better to say ‘welcome back.’”
Michael was too caught up in his senses to piddle over wording.
The streets they walked were filled with faces. Human faces. Like the ones he saw daily on his computer screen or from his vantage over the street. But now he was reminded that no matter how advanced the technology, polymer and pixels could never compare to flesh and blood.
The colors were rich and unchanged by light or screen resolution – rich or dark or pale or blushing, animated and moving with each and every inhale, a mass of humanity breathing in and out together all around him so that he could feel their collective sigh against his face, if only in his mind.
There were other, greater differences than the movements – those wonderful, unpredictable movements unprogrammed and spontaneous. There was warmth, like a flickering of pleasure each and every time another body nudged against him as they moved. He felt it like a steady presence in the shoulder pressed into his own, the dark jacket shifting under the movement of its owner.
And it smelled, good and bad and human, perfumes, toothpaste, shampoo, body odor, sweat, and candy – the pavement tar and roadside garbage and the little throng of teenage girls who came past in pink. As he watched, the blues and blacks of their eyes followed him, and their shy giggles and blushing glances stayed with him even as they passed away. Michael felt a puzzled bemusement at their attention.
A soft chuckle interrupted his polite confusion as the older boy ribbed him playfully, “You a flirt, Michael?” he asked, and winked mischievously.
Michael felt the heat rising against his face, causing his companion to laugh again. Sakaki smelled like well-worn leather and exhaust, and his laugh – a laugh he had never heard within the confines of the STN-J – was inclusive and warm.
The techie was startled by a sudden affectionate shove. He followed Sakaki’s pointing finger to a little shop with a colorful flame-colored awning. “They’ve got sandwiches there, with tomato and mustard and onion. You like sub sandwiches, Michael?” came the accompanying inquiry.
“I’m not sure,” he said honestly. He was positive he had eaten something like them before, sometime in a past that grew dimmer in his memory every week he numbed his body before a computer screen, but now he couldn’t be sure. Had he liked them?
“If you don’t know, then go find out.” His companion offered another shove; he obviously wasn’t conflicted about the issue.
It was one of the things that had drawn Michael to Sakaki at the beginning of their acquaintanceship – that straightforwardness. Chief Kosaka called it exasperating recklessness, hastiness, youth. But really it was a strength in him too. To doubt Sakaki was ridiculous. He would do exactly as he said, and he said exactly everything that was in his noble, stubborn head.
They had lunch at the little bistro, just under the awning and within the reach of the warming sun. The was a cool day, a little grey and increasingly overcast, but for now the pale yellow beams still lit up the pavement. Michael wallowed in it, trying to store up the memory of its kiss on his skin for the time when he’d have to go back.
He tried hard not to think of going back to Solomon.
After eating, they headed for Sakaki’s apartment to get his motorcycle. By that time, Michael was having second guesses about trusting his life to the machine, but it was too late. Sakaki had decided that his friend would have the experience – after all you only lived once.
There was only one helmet, which the rookie hunter forced onto his head. Then he’d straddled the bike and gestured to the footholds that would allow Michael to swing on behind him. Clumsily, the techie did so, shifting uncomfortably once he was settled. The sound of the engine revving made him cling hard to his friend’s jacket, already fearful he would fall off.
After that they were flying. A jerk and a jar of gravel and they were up on the pavement and away, blazing with a roar and the wind down the long road, through and in traffic, untouchable and very fast. Michael gasped at the rush of it, his eyes wide with wonder and heart-thumping terror. He loved it.
And Sakaki laughed like a mad man, all bubbling over with joy. He loved it too.
They must have toured the city on the bike, up and down lanes sprawling with trees or stark with buildings that jutted to the sky. Sometimes Sakaki would point out places they had hunted, but mostly they just rode in silence.
They were speeding past a school when the final class ended. Sakaki stopped the bike suddenly and he and Michael sat back, watching the crowd of students clear out of the yard in a tumult, meeting friends or parents, walking, ridding, playing, chatting. The two observed the schoolyard in wordless fascination.
“You regret, sometimes, never doing that?” Sakaki asked finally. There was something almost wistful in his voice.
It gave the teen pause. He’d thought about it, of course. School wasn’t something he’d expected to miss, but there were a lot of things he hadn’t been prepared to miss. He’d never though about it in terms of the others on his team. Of Sakaki and Robin, and possibly even Karasuma. None of them were out of their teens, and most had been working for Solomon for years already.
“You didn’t go?” Michael asked.
And for a moment, Sakaki looked unsure. “No? No. I’m sure I didn’t. Not high school anyway. I don’t really remember.”
Weird, but there wasn’t anything to say about it. “Yeah, sometimes I regret not going,” Michael answered his friend’s original question. He watched the kids about his age move around one another, but they might as well have been from another world they were so far away from his life. He whispered, “I regret.”
“Yeah,” Sakaki echoed. “Sometimes me too.”
Michael looked around, There was a sweet smell in the air. It was a beautiful place.
“Do you spend a lot of time here?” he asked.
His eyes closed, Sakaki’s head gave an indeterminate wobble. “Sometimes I do,” he answered. “When I don’t feel like I have time to go home or I just need some air, I sometimes come here to catch a nap or relax.”
Michael could see why. It was restful.
Sakaki quirked open an eye. “Hey. I hope that you’ve been okay with today. I know we didn’t go anywhere exciting, but –”
“No!” Michael was quick to reassure. “It’s been…wonderful.” Everyday life was adventure enough for him. He couldn’t remember ever enjoying a day so much.
“Well, good,” the other said, sounding unhappy. “Because you know it has to end. We have to go back. I bet Amon has already exploded all over your desk. He’s going to kill me, you know.”
The techie nodded gamely, thinking about it. It was possible, only he hoped not. He trusted Amon an awful lot, and though he expected the…well, “explosion” he doubted that he would really be lastingly furious, least of all at Sakaki. Michael had long believed that the tall hunter really had a soft spot for his second youngest team member. He treated him as a mentor might, or possibly like a big brother. Though that last distinction might have been pushing it.
“You’ll survive,” he concluded, and put it from his mind. The thought of going back had dampened his spirits, however. “I wish we didn’t have to go back today,” he admitted aloud.
Sakaki looked up at him from his back, that oddly worried expression on his face again. The same one that had lead to their impromptu escape. “Are you going to be okay?” he ventured to ask.
Michael considered it. When he spoke, it was with his hands clasped before him and in his calmest, most unbothered voice. “I am a prisoner,” he said. “A captive, or even a slave. I was so foolish, offering what I did. But I was afraid, and so stupid.”
“You were thirteen, Michael.”
“It doesn’t change that I brought this on myself. It’s lonely, and Zaizen… In a way, I’m afraid of him. Sometimes he seems so fatherly, but other times the look in his eyes…there’s a kind of madness there. And I am always alone. Why did this have to happen to me? I-I…I want to live!”
Sakaki’s hand reached up, gripping his shoulder. Quietly empathetic, he said, “You’re not alone.”
It was the wrong words. Michael pulled away, poison in his voice, “You have no idea what its like. No idea.”
The other boy wore a strange look of knowing, but said, “I’m sorry, Michael. Don’t get upset.”
“It’s my burden. I’ll pay it!”
“I brought you out to help you deal with your pain, Michael. It isn’t’ right that you have no one. We could be great friends. We’re closest in age of all the STN –”
Michael cut him off brutally, “Robin is closer. Barely a year.”
Sakaki looked taken aback for a moment, but his face swiftly sunk down into a quiet gloom. The younger teen read it in his stormy eyes: never good enough. Not to Zaizen, not to Amon, and not to Michael. “You’re right,” he said softly. “Robin.”
Michael realized that he had hurt him…but he was so afraid. He wanted someone to lean on; he wanted to lean on Sakaki. But it had been a long time since he had ventured so much. It had been years, years trapped behind bars.
Before he could work himself up, Sakaki spoke again. “Hey,” he told the conflicted boy. “It’s okay. Don’t get so upset. I’ll back off.”
“No,” Michael shook his head. “You…you are my friend. I’m sorry, Haruto.”
“I just want you to know that I’ll be there for you, Michael. And not just when I put off my paperwork.”
Michael nodded, his throat too tight to speak. He looked up instead, to the churning tumble that had begun to look threatening. It fully covered the sun now, and everything seemed darker. “Looks like rain,” he commented unnecessarily.
Sakaki fidgeted with unease. “I hate thunderstorms,” he admitted, and shuddered. He had such a little boy look on his face that Michael had to laugh. “It isn’t funny!” he snapped in response, but the worried look was still in his eyes as he took in cloud cover.
It shouldn’t have been so comical, Sakaki being afraid of a little noise and rain. But he was usually so brash and brazen that it seemed unlike him.
A crack of thunder split of tableau, jerking the older teen out of his seat like a shot. Nervously, he scanned the sky, festering like wound all mottled blue, yellow, and black. It looked like it would pour out floodwaters at any moment. Another crackling fizzle and Sakaki was bristling like a tomcat.
“Come on,” Sakaki called, dragging Michael up and nodding towards the bike. “Lets go. It’s only going to get worse.”
Sakaki switched the lights on as they came inside, flipping off his shoes in an disorderly pile by the door. Michael followed suit, shivering in his hooded jacket and thin shirt. Usually he lived in an environment controlled setting, neither hot or cold.
“Hey, dry off,” he barely caught the towel that had been flung at him, and gratefully began scrubbing at his damp hair. Better already. Warm, dry clothes were handed to him next, and he hurried to strip out of his wet things. There was no where to lay them out, so they went by the door with their shoes.
“So this is home, or something like it.” Sakaki had cast off his wet jacket onto a table covered with magazines and coffee rings. A sink in the tiny kitchenette was stacked with chipped crockery, and it was among these that the older youth went to seek out clean mugs for them to use. “Tea, or something stronger?”
Michael hardly heard him he was so taken up drinking in the apartment. “Hm? Oh, tea’s fine.”
“Well enough,” Sakaki said, refilling a kettle from the stove.
The techie took his time wandering around the niche of space. It was all one room, mostly empty with an unmade futon laying haphazardly folded in one corner and a rectangular box in another that probably contained clothing. It wasn’t tidy, but there was more a kind of unkempt feeling to the place than anything else, as though the person who lived there did so as infrequently as possible. There was dust on every surface but the table.
The hum of the refrigerator beckoned him, but he wasn’t surprised that when he opened it the only things inside were a half-carton of milk and a squashed packet of instant udon. “What do you eat?” he asked the other, who had since reclined against the counter looking distracted and sleepy while he waited for the water to boil.
Sakaki scratched his calf idly with one foot, shaking his head. “Ah, whatever I can grab on the run. Solomon pays enough for me to eat out, as long as I’m not picky. It’s just not worth keeping anything here. Things spoil.”
Michael looked at him, thinking for the first time about just how much time his team members spent at the STN-J offices. He was used to calling them in at all hours of the night and day, but he’d never thought about how it really wasn’t much more than a way station he was pulling them away from. At least it seemed that way for Sakaki. Obviously he slept here, but not much else.
“Hunting is your life,” he said aloud, unable not to.
Only paying partial attention, the other nodded. He was poking at the kettle, as if decided whether it was too hot to grab with his hand. “I hardly remember anything pre-Solomon anymore. But heck, what else was I supposed to do. Stay out there, go rouge, maybe? No thank you, I’ll hunt. And where that stupid pendant forever, if it takes that.”
The babble almost seemed incomprehensible at first and Michael just smiled at him. But as he thought about it the words started connecting into a startling coherency. The answer came to him so abruptly that he jumped.
Sakaki was a seed. Apart from the STN-J he was just another name in the database. He was a potential. The very idea staggered Michael.
A cup came down on the table, followed by a gesture that indicated he should take it or sit. The teen gathered it up into suddenly cold hands, thankful for the fortifying steam that rose from it, fragrant in his nostrils. Sakaki put down his whole mug in one swallow.
“Mm, bed,” he murmured. “Between today and yesterday I’m beat.”
A flutter of apprehension. “But what about Solomon? Haruto, I need to get back.”
“Tomorrow. S’late.”
“But –”
Sakaki was already spreading the futon out, spilling the heavy comforter out onto the floor beside it into a crumpled, plumped up mass like a nest in a den. It just made room enough for two. With a wordless grunt he fell upon the makeshift bed, curling and tossing a bit so that he became hopelessly tangled in the blanket. But he’d kindly left he thin mattress and at last a quarter of the coverlet for his friend.
It shouldn’t have looked so cozy or inviting. The whole apartment should have left him unimpressed and ready to leave. But he could hear Sakaki’s long, even breaths already, and the spot beside him that had been made up just for Michael beckoned. The warmth from the tea was in his hands now, and down his limbs. It made feel him sleepy and pliable.
A few more hours away didn’t seem so long. So, unworried about the consequences, Michael gave into his body’s demands and went to cuddle up next to Sakaki, safe and free for just a little longer.
Sakaki sprung up dazedly, panic and fierce defensiveness struggling to take preeminence over the peaceful sleep in his violet eyes. His revolver was tight in his hand even as he regained his feet, but the STN-J logo marked on the breast plate of each intruder’s black jacket made him hesitate to fire a round.
Michael cried out as they came upon his friend, wrenching the weapon from his fingers and throwing him hard against the wall. They pressing his face harshly into the plaster while they dragged his arms behind him.
Rough hands had Michael under the armpits in the next moment, pulling him upright from the safety of the warm blankets and pressing him towards the door. Tall soldiers flanked him on both sides but they did not move to bind him, even as he heard the sharp click of the older teen’s own manacles snapping tight.
“What’s going on?” Sakaki’s voice seemed loud and frustrated. Any further protests he might have made were cut off by a wordlessly brutal cuff with the butt of a rifle. His head hit the wall again and he slide to the floor, only semi-conscious.
Michael saw the blood, and made an attempt to get to him, pushing at the restraining hands of his guard, “Haruto!”
The youth was dazed, but not down. He tried to get up again, his face contorted with pain and anger, “Michael? Leave him alone!” But he may as well as saved his breath and his energy. Another mechanically violent blow stopped his assent, and then they dragged him up and towards the door, one hand in his hair and the other digging hard into his clavicle.
Unable to do anything but watch, Michael could only cry as he was pushed relentlessly down the rickety iron stair to the black van that was waiting for them before the apartment complex. It was stark against what was nearly dawn, onyx implacable against the dull grey sky. They shoved him inside, not ungently. One of the big men buckled a seatbelt around his waist and pressed him back against the seat when he tried to wrench forward.
“Be still now,” he said in a voice that was startlingly human coming from those black, featureless faces. Even their hands were gloved in black leather; no skin, so eyes, no compassion…but for him, also no cruelty.
They were sent to fetch him, he realized. Solomon.
He didn’t even realize when the building swallowed him up again until it was over and he was being ushered into the long elevator and then the office that had, until recently, been his whole life. Overcome, he was startled to find that Amon was there, looking as though he had been waiting. He turned away, though, when Michael sought security in his gaze with round, petrified eyes.
It was Chief Kosaka that came to him instead. His hands seemed to shake slightly when they bore down on the young man’s shoulders, holding onto him. For a moment he almost looked like a father, worried over a son that hadn’t been home by curfew. Almost. Except that his eyes were too afraid.
“Haruto,” Michael managed to gasp. Sakaki hadn’t been with him in the van. “Haruto. Is he alright?”
The head of sparse dark hair shook. Red-rimmed, hollow looking eyes gazed out at him over a mouth like a taught line. Hoarsely, the man whispered, “What have you done? Why would you do this? Don’t you understand the consequences?”
The understanding was hitting him now, bowling him over like a flood, or a rock rolling downhill. Sakaki had made it seem so simple. They’d left a note, they’d gone out but they would come back. They’d come back first thing in the morning, no problem. It was less than a day.
“Haruto,” Michael was almost sobbing. He gripped at the man’s arms. “Where is he?”
“Zaizen has him,” Amon broke in suddenly, and his deep voice stamped each word in the air so barren and black that it stole the younger man’s breath.
No. Zaizen. He’d hurt him. No.
“This is your fault,” Amon continued. The studied blankness of his expression was at its limit under the weight of the situation. Tight lines were drawn at his eyes – anger, or worry. “It was unspeakably foolish! What were you both thinking?”
“I wanted to get out.” His voice was so small. The world was resonating strangely. He hardly felt the grip his boss had around his shoulders, didn’t realize he was being lead again. In this time. The chair rose up to met him almost as his legs gave out. His own hands went to his face. “Amon. I didn’t run. I just…Haruto said we could get out, just for a little while. And then the rain… B-but we were coming back!”
“It doesn’t matter what you intended,” Amon ground out, and his black eyes were snapping now. “Zaizen will not consider your excuses – or Sakaki’s, if he is stupid enough to voice them. You left, knowing that you were never allowed. It was stay or loose your life. And now possibly it’s his.”
Sakaki? No. Zaizen wouldn’t.
“The team had four before Robin, and it could as easily be four again.” The dark hunter could read his thoughts. He demanded Michael understand, “Do you think he’ll be spared for his usefulness?”
It was with those words that Michael broke down desolately and wept.
It was Doujima who finally broke the silence. She came and sat down beside him at his desk, looking up earnestly into his face until he was pulled unwillingly from the solace of his data into an unhappy meeting in her deep blue eyes.
“He’s okay,” she said softly to him, too soft to carry over the regular office chatter. And suddenly she had his every attention. She said, “He’s okay, or else he will be. He gave me this today.”
She slid a folded yellow sticky note up onto the desktop, innocuous among the other clutter. It hardly stuck out at all. Michael stared at it.
The girl nodded toward the message and reached to press her hand briefly against his, still settled over the keyboard. Then she left him just as fleetingly as she came. Doujima was very like a butterfly, he’d often thought before. Lovely and flighty. But she was also a good friend; willful, not unlike Sakaki.
The note stuck to his fingers when he picked it up. The strip of adhesive was dirty with lint and oils and a single long strand of sandy colored hair, but it clung feebly to the pads of his fingertips as he unfolded it.
He had to clinch down hard on his emotions in order to read the short note, a more than usually incomprehensible scribble of wavering lines and half-formed letters. It said:
Michael,
D said you’re sad and you shouldn’t be. He’s a damn bastard, but hell if it wasn’t worth it for the sun. Wasn’t it worth it?
And then a trailing symbol in the far corner, the first of Sakaki’s name. Michael was holding it so tightly that imprints were left in the already crumpled paper. Teeth clinched, he sat for a moment and concentrated on swallowing, on keeping his composure.
But slowly a small, tight smile began to form on his face. It was sorrowful, but also glad in its way. He caught a glimmer through his window, and turned his face toward it and the dim sun filtering through it in lazy streamers. He watched the floating dust, remembering the warmth he’d felt on his day of freedom.
Worth it? There was little that even the wide world could offer that would be worth the price he’d paid. But Sakaki was okay, and he didn’t regret what they’d done. He didn’t regret the park and the school and the warm blankets in the apartment home.
And, knowing that, Michael found that he couldn’t regret those times either, not for anything. The sun was what it was, and though he would miss it he wouldn’t suffer too much without it. But as he tucked the little note carefully into the safety of his jeans pocket, the boy reflected that he would suffer without his friend.
He only hoped he would be back to work soon.
a/n: About a thousands words of this story was written two years ago, and then I lost the sequence of sticky note messages left by Sakaki and Michael. Without this essential scene, I cast the story to the side. However, yesterday night while digging through some ancient notebooks, I rediscovered the missing part and typed out the rest of the story on a kind of accidental whim. Most of this whim took place between the hours of one and six in the morning, which may account for the rough quality. Still, in spite of all these factors I hope you enjoyed it. It always pleases me when I am able to drag a forgotten scraplet out of the dark and refashion it, edited and complete.
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