First, Do No Harm
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

Chapter Three – Like Cures Like

Five fifty on a Friday night and the sky beginning to bruise and the windows spattered with the first heavy drops of rain, and the four members of Weiss in the kitchen and out of place there, all dark clothes and balked tension. Anxiety waited patiently on them, an uninvited guest nobody could work up the nerve to force to leave. The wait was always the worst part – and, afterwards, that would be the worst part too. Alone with one another and the simple fact of a mission, there was no way Aya could pretend his companions were anything but what they were: he didn’t care to lie to himself at the best of times, and he certainly didn’t now. These men were simply his teammates, and they had come together only to kill.

Youji’s long black duster lay draped far too casually across the back of the couch its owner lay sprawled upon, idly smoking; Ken, flushed and weary-looking, fidgeted with the release mechanism of his bugnuks, the claws slipping out of their housing with a flex of the boy’s fist, then back as he let his fingers fall open again. The soft, metallic hiss and snick was jarring.

Aya wished he wouldn’t do that.

Aya wished he knew who Ken was, and what he thought he was doing there. By rights, they never should have met.

Across the room, Omi sat at the kitchen table with a screwdriver poised between his slender fingers, changing the batteries in a comm. unit. Aya couldn’t watch him work, he’d had to turn away. He couldn’t stand watching the delicate fluttering of the boy’s hands, the way he fussed so painstakingly over the tiny components. I’m sure they’d last out tonight, he had said, but—

(—but none of us have lived this long by taking unnecessary risks.)

“If she’s really pushing thirty,” Ken said into the silence, “then I’m Namie Amuro.”
“If she’s really called Elizabeth,” Youji said, effortlessly raising him, “I’m Philip Marlowe.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray in a single, decisive motion, then immediately lit another. (Chain-smoking; the single nervous habit Youji didn’t like to admit he had.) “Come on, Kenken, the woman’s a genuine fake. Of course she’s lying about her age.”

Doctor Elizabeth Takagawa, said the Thousand Leaves Clinic homepage, is a graduate of Ashwood University, California –the university had turned out to be as fake as her doctorate. It offered no classes, it had no faculty, it would certify absolutely anyone – provided they could pay. Fifteen minutes online and Omi had found the university homepage: another half hour and six hundred dollars and, he said, he could have become a doctor, too.

Keisuke Amano – Aya had known it from the start – knew nothing; he was Takagawa’s pawn and nothing more, lending her respectability by association, handing her victims on a plate. She had faked her own life the better to use him, and now she was using his patients to… what?

“Not just that,” Omi said, placing his screwdriver down and turning in his chair to gaze gravely at his teammates. “I looked into the records. We were right, Aya-kun. The Hahnemann Institute is a sham.”

Tucking the newly-repaired comm. unit into his jacket pocket, Omi unrolled a set of architect’s blueprints, weighing down one corner with a half-empty coffee mug. The blueprints, of course, they had all seen before. They were scored with highlighted bands indicating possible weaknesses (the back door, a single side window tucked discreetly away from the curious gazes of the neighbors, a skylight set into the sloping roof of what looked like it had once been a treatment room) and the bold strokes of a thick black marker showing proposed entrance and exit routes.

“This,” Omi said, slapping one gloved hand down hard onto the blueprints, “isn’t the Hahnemann Institute. The Hahnemann Institute doesn’t exist.”
Ken blinked at him. “Doesn’t exist? What’s this we’re going to, then?”
“According to tax records, it’s Three Pines Surgery,” Omi said. “Or it was Three Pines Surgery, before Doctor Maeda left.”

Nobody quite knew why Doctor Maeda had left. He simply hadn’t opened up his surgery one day and then again the next. There’d been a tax investigation pending, and if rumor could be believed he’d been fiddling his books for years. Probably the threat of a through investigation of his accounting practices had been enough to have him panic and skip town with the takings… Whatever the reason was he had gone, leaving his surgery shuttered and bolted, his equipment walled up inside –and leaving Liza Takagawa with an opening.

Target confirmed.

From the front, the Hahnemann Institute of Natural Therapy looked much the same as it must have done in the venerable Doctor Maeda’s day, before he was done in by his not-so-venerable bookkeeping practices. The grass in the front yard was slightly overlong, the paintwork about the windowframes could have done with touching up; it was a patched-up overcoat of a place, shabby and fraying slightly about the edges but that, for a small clinic in a not exactly over-prosperous neighborhood, was hardly remarkable. Only the name plate by the door looked new.

It was a nothing of a place. Just another shabby little concern, hoping to make up for its gently disintegrating offices and unimpressive locale with a farcically pretentious name. It looked like so many other small suburban businesses. It looked legitimate, or close enough to it to pass.

The most striking thing about the surgery was that Weiss were watching it. Youji and Ken from across the road, hidden in the convenient patch of shadow cast by an apartment building’s overhang; the others strayed closer. Aya, a patient shadow, loitered discreetly by the vulnerable back door while Omi perched precariously on the roof. A cool evening with just a hint of a breeze and the skylight he crouched by creaked and rattled in a manner that would have done any haunted house proud, the glass loose in a rotting frame: it would be the work of a minute for the boy to force it open and slip quietly inside, it would take seconds for him to kick out the frame, now you see me now you don’t, and drop down in a clatter of falling glass to chase down the target, should she decide to run rather than stand…

There was, they had decided, no harm in Ken going in through the front. Takagawa knew he was coming. The target, Omi had said, would probably be more suspicious if she didn’t hear someone come in the front doors than if she did.

And Youji likewise. (We don’t know what she’s planning; we just know she wants him dead. Why take chances?)

Massage therapy, she’d called it: Ken had blushed when he admitted that was what Takagawa had offered him, muttered it sulkily and scowled like a schoolboy when Youji had laughed. Probably they weren’t all offered that. That, Youji thought, would be a lure for the men. The gymnast could have been offered chiropractic, the older women aromatherapy or crystal healing or flower remedies or anything at all. It wasn’t like she’d actually have to deliver on her promises, so why did it matter what she told them, as long as it got them through the door?

God knew what she was doing to them when she got them in there, or how she managed to do it, but it was sounding to Youji like it would involve some degree of… call it laying on of hands. But how could her touch cause cancers, or strokes—?

“Target sighted.”

The buzz of the carrier signal cut across his thoughts (absurd thoughts anyway, far better let them go), and then there was Omi’s voice – loud and clear as if the boy had been stood behind him, and leaned forward to speak in his ear. By the time Takagawa drove her nondescript little town car up to the clinic doors and slid it, with pointless precision, neatly into one of the marked bays, Weiss were watching for her.

The engine cut off, Doctor Takagawa gracefully unfolded herself from the front seat – and from across a clinic car park, the tarmac cracked and scored with springing clumps of weeds, Youji got his first view of Miss Venice Beach. She moved like a model, hips swaying, head held proudly erect, her long, straight hair, burnished by the glow of the streetlights, swinging across her shoulders with every step, back and forth like the hand of a metronome. Yes, she was very much like a model and yet, despite her poise, despite her grace and elegance, there was still something of the girl about her.

She didn’t look like any kind of doctor to Youji.

She didn’t (Ken was right) look like she was pushing thirty, either. She can’t be, Youji thought. She’s my age—

“That’s a go, Omi,” Youji murmured, keying his own comm. It was all he could do to suppress a long, low, admiring whistle. “I got her. Will you look at that.” Over the comm., he thought he heard Omi sigh, and he smirked. Really, the kid should have been grateful. At least this way Omi could be sure he was actually paying attention…
“Will you give it up for five minutes?!” Ken hissed; no need for the comm. this time. Ken truly was behind him, and he proved it by giving Youji a painful jab in the ribs with one finger. “She’s a target, for Chrissake!”
“Yeah,” Youji admitted with a sigh, “I know. Still a nice view, though.”

Takagawa paused in the entryway, fidgeting briefly with her handbag; the faint clatter of keys and she was pushing open the surgery door, vanishing into the darkened building. The door swung to behind her, creaking slightly on poorly-oiled hinges. A gap of perhaps five seconds and the lights snapped on sudden and startling, blazing in the windows of the waiting-room and the entryway, in a small room that might have been an office or a treatment room or anything at all. Light like a trail, marking her progress through the empty building. And action.

She hadn’t, Youji noted, made the mistake of only switching on the lights she needed and leaving the rest of the building to languish in suspicious shadow. Smart move. No stranger, walking past now, would have guessed that the surgery had sprung to life bare minutes earlier. Takagawa’s victims wouldn’t have known. Ken wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t been watching already, if he had been only what he appeared to be…

“Could we have radio silence, please?” Omi spoke quietly but Youji knew it for an order, and as close to a rebuke as the teenager was going to get.

And then there was nothing at all, just the glow of the lights, the sound of traffic on the main road. Ten past eight on a Friday and there were so many other things he could have been doing with a night like this – a night which was cool but not cold, the sky hung about with clouds, powder-pink and fluffy as the cotton-wool balls on a kindergartner’s collage. The leaves of the bushes and the sleek hides of cars were glazed with droplets of water, the sidewalk glistened after a short, sharp shock of a shower, and the air was heavy with the clean, heady smell that follows the rain.

There was potential in a night like this. And here he was stuck outside an old surgery with a dazed and shivering Ken Hidaka (and the boy, leaning heavily against the wall, was coughing again, his head lowered and shoulders shaking), with nothing to do but watch the doors and wait for Omi to give the word. Brother.

Takagawa’s shadow flitted past one of the downstairs windows.

“What,” Ken murmured, and his voice was quiet and so hoarse that Youji had to strain to hear, “d’you think she’s doing?”
“No idea,” Youji said, wrapping one gloved hand over the headset of his comm. “Getting ready, I guess…” Glancing back over the curve of one banked shoulder, he thought he saw Ken swallow slightly; it might just have been his cold. Ken didn’t look nervous, he’d give the kid that much. Youji wondered what he was thinking.
All the boy said was, “Reckon she’s alone?”
“Can’t see any sign of anyone else, so most likely…”

It wasn’t what Ken had wanted to ask. He didn’t look anxious, but his face was a betrayal all the same. Ken was frowning, Youji could tell by the way the shadows fell across the planes and lines of his face – brows drawn sharply downward, lips slightly pursed – and by the look in his indiscreet eyes. How does she kill them, Youji? What do you think she does?

(Are we all going to die?)

“Mission commencing,” Omi said, to none of them and to all of them at once. “Move in.”

Youji – tugging off his comm. and pocketing it, for what would Takagawa think if tonight’s intended prey showed up with a man wearing a radio headset? – gave Ken a quick, confirmatory nod he hadn’t actually needed, then slipped from the shadows and down the clinic path, moving quiet and subtle as smoke. Ken pushed past him when they reached the entrance, ducking through and, in a gesture of courtesy rendered bizarre by context, holding the door open for Youji, too.

Takagawa would find out he was there soon enough, but why spoil the surprise? Youji gave Ken a reassuring smile (and Ken, of course, hadn’t needed that, either) and followed him in.

What was inside was normality, or a very close approximation but, though the general impression was one of ordered tedium, the details were jarringly off. The waiting-room chairs looked uncomfortable, their cushions lumpy and sagging, and the shaggy dracaena lurking in the corner ran rampant, and riotously, comically so. The stack of Health and Beauty magazines scattered across the small side table were perhaps a bit too new and looked almost untouched, as if they were there more because doctors’ waiting-rooms always had magazines than because anyone had ever had much call to sit down and read them. Even the air, stale and thrice-used and tainted with dust, and the sweetish scents of damp and rot, was wrong.

It was another front, though it wasn’t a particularly good one. Youji could almost have owned himself disappointed.

“Gloves,” he whispered, glancing down at Ken's hands.
“Oh, thanks.” Ken quickly tugged off his gauntlets and shoved them in one of his jacket pockets. He took off his goggles, too, shaking his head so his hair fell more naturally. “Um, you should probably do the same. And take off your coat. Or open it, or something.”

So you don’t, the implication went, look so much like a bad-ass assassin, and he was probably right about that. Youji shrugged off his coat, draping it over one arm. If Takagawa asked, he’d say he was going on to a club.

Aside from the pair of them, the waiting-room was empty. The reception desk stood vacant; there was no sign of the target. Ken wandered over to the desk, burdened with stacks of paperwork and an old computer, large and lumpish, that had probably been shut up with the surgery when Doctor Maeda ran off. Out of hours, said a new-looking sign, hand-printed in a foreigner’s too-precise kanji, please ring and wait for attention. Next to it lurked a small brass bell, like something lifted from a hotel lobby.

Ken rung it, mindful of prints, with one elbow, then went to lean on the counter. That, the look in his eyes and the guilty, half-furtive expression on his face asked, was right, wasn’t it?

A door banged somewhere down the corridor and Takagawa bustled in, an unbuttoned white coat hastily thrown over her street clothes. She did a double-take when she saw Youji there, an uncertain expression flickering briefly across her even features: it was here and gone in a second, and if Youji hadn’t been looking out for it he might almost have told himself he had imagined it.

“Kudou-san,” she said, and Youji started slightly, only to realize Takagawa was looking not at him, but at Ken. He’d told this woman his name was Kudou? Couldn’t the kid have chosen a better cover? “I’m so glad you could make it on such short notice.” Yeah, Youji thought, I bet you are. “How are you feeling this evening?”
Ken raised his head, gave her an uncertain smile that didn’t quite work right. “About the same,” he said. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Oh, I‘m sorry to hear that. Well, you’ll probably find you sleep a lot better tonight, and you’ll be able to lie down when we get inside, of course.” Takagawa gave Ken a small, playful smile that to Youji’s eyes had looked almost flirtatious; out of the corner of his eyes, he thought he saw Ken color, and bridle slightly. She thought she was being charming. She didn’t seem to realize it was repelling him. “I’ll consider myself forewarned if you drop off on the table.”
“Does that happen a lot?” Ken asked, making a brave attempt to sound curious.
“It can do. So,” Takagawa said with a games-mistress’s ghastly sham jollity, “shall we get started, then?”
Youji wouldn’t have noticed how nervous she sounded, either, if he hadn’t been listening for that, too

As she turned to show Ken down the hall Takagawa – I thought I told him to come alone! – gave Youji a strange look. She saw, in his presence, a pet project subtly undermined, and she couldn’t quite keep the frown from her face: he, as if oblivious to anything but the simple fact that here was a pretty young woman looking intently at him, smiled back at her. She seemed to be on the verge of demanding he tell her his name, and what he thought he was doing here.

But what Takagawa said was, “Will you be wanting to stay with him?”
“Well, there’s nothing else to do round here,” Youji said with a shrug, “and he’s gotta get back somehow.”
“I see. Well, if you’d like to follow me, I’m sure we can find something to do with you.”

(And yes, Youji thought, that probably had been supposed to sound sinister. I know what you’re thinking, Miss Venice Beach. You’re thinking, this could mean trouble. You’re thinking, I can’t let him walk out of here. You’re thinking, I’m going to have to kill the other one, too…

(Too bad you’re going to have to change your plans.)

There was no nameplate on the consulting-room door, though Youji could see the scars of screws marking the place where one must have been before. Takagawa opened the door, stepped back to usher them in – beside him, he felt Ken tense, and he placed a hand on the boy’s forearm – to reassure? To restrain? Ken turned and made to move and then she was slamming the door behind them, far too loud and far too fast. A key scraped in the lock. Elizabeth Takagawa was smiling.

There was no point pretending any more. This was where the cover ended; this was what had been behind it all along and there must, Youji thought pointlessly, have been another room somewhere, an actual treatment room, where she would have seen the people she decided to let live…

This wasn’t that room. It was sunk into crepuscular shadow, illuminated only by the light falling through the wide, curtain-less windows and a single desk lamp resting on the floor in one corner and it might as well not have bothered, there was so little to see. The walls were bare, the paint cracked and flaking and stained here and there with streaks of rot, the floor smeared with dust and scattered with chunks of fallen plaster. The air reeked of decay and of illness, and spent fear. The room (so what does she do to them? What does she use?) was empty, empty as a stage after the sets are struck and the actors have left – it held nothing save for a single straight-backed chair with a hard little backrest and a cushioned seat bleeding stuffing, and an old leather-and-steel examining couch set just off-center.

“What the Hell?” Ken demanded. “What do you think you’re—!”
Takagawa’s smile didn’t falter for an instant. “I’m going to need you to lie down…”

And then there was Omi, too.

Omi. The boy had been tracking Ken from the roof, watching and waiting for Takagawa to make her move. Now, hearing Ken's voice, then Takagawa’s, watching him, as a point of light on the screen of his laptop, walk into a room a matter of feet away and stop there, Omi would have made his own. He slipped through the invitingly gaping skylight, landing with a heavy thump in a sudden, startling skitter of loose masonry – wood and small pebbles and a flurry of plaster dust. Another thump and something fell to the floor in a tinkling discord of breaking glass and Omi was slamming open the treatment-room door, a dart poised between his gloved fingers.

“Takagawa!”

The woman started, her head snapping up, painted lips falling open into a perfect O of surprise. Too startled to think of fury, or of fear or dismay, she half-turned to face the source of the sound, a look of confusion spreading across her face as she realized she had been interrupted by a child.

And then she was falling, a neurotoxin-tipped dart sticking from the back of her neck.

Youji relaxed. Slipping back into his coat, tugging on his gloves, he walked over to Takagawa’s fallen body and lifted the keys from her coat pocket, unlocking the consulting-room door and letting in Aya. Aya, katana drawn, stepped inside, a disdainful look on his face as he glanced about himself at the stained walls, the single lamp, the examining couch. Yeah, Youji wanted to say, I know, goddamn targets and their theatrics. He didn’t say it, though. Irreverent though he may have been, it just felt wrong to joke about these people after the fact, in front of their still-warm corpses.

Takagawa lay face-down on the floor, one high-heeled shoe half-off, her corn-silk hair spilling over her face. Her eyes were staring, her manicured hands clutching uselessly at her throat. She had forgotten how to breathe and drowned in air: a far quicker and more merciful end than many of her victims had been granted.

“I wonder how she did it,” Ken said, “after all that?” All his attention was on his hands as he put his own gloves, too big and, with the weapon, too cumbersome to be carried comfortably in his pockets, back on. “She’s got no kit in here. You reckon it was a drug, after all?”
Omi shrugged. “Probably something like that, Ken-kun. Guess we’ll never know now.”

He couldn’t see how it mattered, as long as she was finished – a target was a target was a target and that was all there was to say. Already Omi was turning to leave, stepping neatly around the woman’s fallen body and crossing to Aya at the door. Youji, hesitating to light a quick cigarette and snatch a glimpse at his watch, followed, hands tucked deep into the pockets of his pants as he drifted over to join them. Not yet quarter to nine. A shower and a quick change later and maybe he would get to make something of tonight, after all—

“Christ!”

Ken.

Ken – and who could explain why he had done it? Probably even Ken couldn’t have told them that – was staring back into the body of the room over one banked shoulder, his eyes wide and his lips slightly parted. Caught on Ken’s shout, Youji turned to him, the others turned to him and it was on the tip of Youji’s tongue to say, what’s wrong? but the words died unspoken. It was only too obvious what had unsettled him.

Doctor Takagawa was getting to her feet.

Ken crossed himself. “Mary Mother of God.”
And what, Youji wondered, did that have to do with it? The cigarette tumbled from suddenly slack fingers. “I thought that dart was tipped!” he heard himself shouting – only to meet Omi’s gaze, and stop short. The boy was staring at Takagawa, his blue eyes wide and frightened.
“But it was,” Omi was saying softly. “It was tipped, Youji-kun. It was tipped…”

But she was still alive. For fuck’s sakes, Omi, Youji thought, screw your pride! it can’t have been tipped, not properly, not if she’s getting up! It can’t have been! Takagawa stood – a little unsteadily, but she was standing. It was a lot more than anyone else had managed after getting hit with one of Omi’s tipped darts. As they watched, she reached behind herself, tugged the dart from the back of her neck and, wincing slightly, cast it to the floor where it rolled into one of the corners. She straightened, brushing her hair from her face, and frowned in vexation.

“Oh,” she said in an utterly normal voice, “you’re still here.”

Ken didn’t think about it: he simply moved. The dart hadn’t worked, so maybe this would – shaking off surprise easy as a dog shook water from its coat he ran for Takagawa, a soft snick telling a tale of blades unleashed from their housing. She started, stumbling backward on her impractical shoes, raising her arms to protect her eyes from the bared claws of Ken's bugnuks: Takagawa cried out, staggering, as the blades ripped fabric and lacerated flesh, tearing through the soft, vulnerable skin of her forearms and laying them open.

Already she was finished. Blood spattered across Ken's cheek, down the side of his jaw, and he pressed forward. Pressing his advantage. She was frightened, she was bleeding out already: another single thrust, under the ribs and up, and it would be over. The claws clicked back into place – and Takagawa placed one bloodied hand on the side of his throat, slender fingers grazing against the skin. He flinched.

He fell.

She touched his shoulder gentle as a lover, her fingers leaving a trail of blood smeared across the side of his throat, and Ken had stiffened, his head snapping back, his muscles tensed; it was almost as if he had suffered an electric shock. For a single sickening moment he had simply stood there, frozen, Takagawa’s hand resting on his shoulder – then Ken collapsed like a string-cut puppet, legs giving way as he slumped to the floor, striking the back of his head hard against the scuffed linoleum. Eyes closed, lips parted, he lay at Takagawa’s feet, unmoving…

And that’s how she did it, Ken. God knew how, or why, but this woman could turn people’s own bodies against them.

Omi screamed. “Ken-kun!”

He sounded terrified. It was only instinct that had him tear another dart from its housing, fling it blindly at Takagawa: get away from Ken. Get away from him! This time, Takagawa didn’t fall. She didn’t even react. The woman merely winced as the dart struck her in the shoulder, pulling it out and throwing it to the ground. It might as well have been a child’s toy. Her pale eyes full of hard contempt, she gazed levelly at them for a long, suspended moment. Did you really think this was going to be that easy? A minute could have passed like this, or it could have been as many as five, before Takagawa moved again

Nobody move – she didn’t have to say it. Dropping to her knees, Takagawa rested one slender, delicate hand on Ken's chest, just above the heart.

“Back off,” she said conversationally.

It was only then that Youji realized Ken was still alive.

“I could kill him,” Takagawa said into the sudden, heavy silence. “I could stop his heart just by thinking about it. Don’t make me prove it.”

Youji said nothing. Aya said nothing, though his hands tightened almost imperceptibly about the hilt of his katana – the slight shift of stance, the slight furrowing of the brow were enough to give it away. Omi, however, Youji could almost see relax. If Ken was still alive then the situation was salvageable. There would have to be a way to get him away from her. There would be a way, and Omi would find it. What else could he do?

Takagawa raised her head, her hair falling from her eyes and her right hand resting, palm-down, on Ken’s chest as if it had merely fallen there by accident, and she would lift it away the minute she realized that was where it was. It was a lie. One wrong move, Youji knew, and Ken was a dead man.

“You don’t want to kill me,” Takagawa said. She sounded sly, insinuating; she was a weasel with an egg in its mouth, held at bay in the corner of a barn. How absurd she looked, crouched on the floor with her hair in her face, trying to bargain with them over the unconscious body of their teammate. ”You can’t kill me. I’ll just heal…” And it must have been natural for her, easy as blinking. “I’ll spare him, if you let me go. I had to do it, it had to be tried, a power like mine can’t be left to waste but I can’t do it without learning how, I have to learn how. You’ve got to understand I’m trying to help. I’m just trying to learn how to fix things.”

Youji couldn’t help himself. He asked, fix things? What did she mean by that?

She told them. Ever since she was a child, Takagawa said, she’d been able to make people ill. All she had to do was touch them, and they would get sick. It had started small at first. Colds. Sprains. The occasional cut. Little things. Nothing anybody really minded, things that would have happened anyway… but, as she got older, things got worse. Some of the people she had been angry with had been so sick they died, and she’d tried to make them better, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t cure. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t heal anybody but herself. Not yet. No, not yet, but maybe someday—

(She would murder a few for the sake of saving many. If a handful of little lives were lost now, that was a pity – but wouldn’t their involuntary sacrifice be worth it, if it saved so many others? And oh, God, the worst thing about it was Youji had heard it all before, and it hadn’t even been from a target…)

“You’ve got to understand. It’s all worth it! I could cure anything,” she said, and her voice was full of pride, and it made Youji feel nauseated. “Anything at all. All I have to do is learn how and I can’t learn if I don’t practice. I can heal myself, you all saw it! Imagine what it would be like if I could do that to anyone who needed it! Imagine how I could—”

Takagawa must have taken her eyes off Omi. Just for a second, but it had been all the boy had needed. Snatching another dart from the case at his waist, he threw it clean into her left eye.

She screamed, her blood-smeared hands flying to her face and, screaming, she fell backward, blood and serous fluid, clear and sticky, seeping through her fingers and coursing down her cheek. Landed heavily on the floor, hands still to her face, but she was already trying to move again, struggling to push herself up. Back on her knees, hands held defensively before her face, Takagawa whimpered as she tugged gently at the dart with one hand, slick and sticky fingers slipping from the metal barrel as she tried to pull the point from her eye.

Omi was running, pushing between Youji and Aya and toward Ken, catching him beneath the arms and dragging him back toward the door. Ken hung in his arms heavy as a corpse, his head falling backward, the gentle stirring of his breath just barely ghosting against Omi’s chest. Youji moved to him, snatching for the collar of Ken’s jacket, felt the boy’s hair spilling, soft and ticklish, against his bare wrist.

“I’ve got this!” Omi shouted, catching him in the ribs with one elbow. “Just go, Youji-kun!”

Get her while she’s down.

Youji didn’t need to be told twice. He moved, fingers snatching for his watch and fumbling with clumsy fingers for the catch that sprung the release – and the bloodied dart clanged against the floor, rolling off beneath the couch. Too late, Kudou! You really thought this was going to be easy? Once again Takagawa scrambled to her feet, blinking once, twice, wiping at her blood-spattered cheek with one hand; she must have heard him move because she turned her head toward him, blinking again as if she were having trouble clearing her—

Blind spot, Youji thought. She couldn’t heal everything, after all!

Got you. He darted forward, past Omi – the boy dropping to his knees by the doorway with Ken lying heavy in his arms – and toward the treatment-room door, feet scuffing slightly on the littered floor. Saw Takagawa following the sound, turning to try and look at him; she turned too late. The woman would have seen only the graceful arc of Youji’s arm, and the briefest flash of light gleaming on fine metal. She gasped, and half-turned, and made to run.

Already it was too late for that. The harigane caught Takagawa about the arms, the throat, wrapping her in skeins of wire and pinning her to the old curtain rail that spanned the length of the windows.

Like an angler playing a fish, Youji wrapped his gloved fingers about the slack and tugged on the wire, feeling it cutting into his palms – feeling it jerking the woman’s hands further up above her head. Watched as the harigane, glowing faintly and malevolently in the lamplight, tightened about her limbs, dug into the soft, pale flesh of her throat drawing droplets of blood, like bloody pearls strung on a piano-wire choker—and she was trying to heal over it, Youji realized with a sudden sick lurch. Her skin was trying to grow back over the wires that dug into it, and she could no more stop it from happening than she could keep herself from drawing breath.

“What are you doing?” Takagawa shrieked, struggling against the wires that constrained her and laying open the newly-formed skin again, sending fine rivulets of blood down her pinioned arms to slowly seep into the already-stained fabric of her suit. “I can’t be killed, not now! You’ve got to understand, you stupid boys, I could—”
“Now, Aya!” Youji cut her off. “Now!”

Aya stepped calmly forward, katana gripped tightly in both hands, face as closed-off and inhuman and terrible in its beauty as that of an avenging angel’s. Takagawa met his eyes and they were cold and narrow and utterly empty, as if the man behind them had put himself elsewhere – at least for now. Aya moved, and his motions were filled with terrible, deadly grace as he slipped into effortless life, blade poised to strike. And, with a smooth, even negligent flick of the wrist, he struck.

The katana transfixed her, neat as a butterfly skewered on a pin.

Takagawa’s lips parted in a silent scream, her eyes wide and white-rimmed. A second of exquisite pain and then she was slumping forward, a trickle of blood running down her chin and welling slowly from the single wound in her chest as Aya stepped back, the katana slipping from her body as he turned away. Caught in her wire prison, it was only the wires cutting into her arms and throat that held Takagawa on her feet.

But already the bloodflow was slowing. Already Takagawa’s chest was heaving as she snatched a breath, then another. She was still alive. They poisoned her, they laid open her flesh and ran her through – still she lived.

Youji took a pace back, the wire shrieking a protest; his free hand went to his lips as if to stifle a cry, but there was nothing. No words, no sound. Takagawa’s shoulders shook; she gave a small, soft, choked-off sound, dying deep in the throat, and then another—oh Christ, Youji realized in numbed and horrified amazement, she’s crying...

Crouched on the floor by Ken’s side, Omi paled visibly, his face a study in terrible uncertainty and his fingers tightening about his friend’s shoulders, gripping hard enough to bruise. Ken winced beneath his grasp, murmuring a soft and petulant protest, and opened his eyes. Snatching for orientation the boy blinked and looked up, casting about himself for something to anchor himself: he saw only Takagawa, like a creature from a nightmare, raise her head and turn her eyes, one palest blue, the other merely black on white – irisless, glazed and unfocused, but pain-filled and tear-glazed – upon them.

“Jesus fuck,” Ken said, the words caught and carried on his breath, like an afterthought.

And nothing happened. They simply stood and waited, caught like actors before the cameras have started rolling, waiting only for a cue. Takagawa’s cheeks were tear-stained but her eyes – if looks could kill – blazed with naked fury, promising death to anyone who strayed close enough to touch: Omi clung to Ken like a drowning man to driftwood, as if Ken was the only thing he could be sure of any more. Even through his gloves, Youji could feel the play of his breath against his fingers, he could smell warm leather and the faintest copper taint of blood, but he had no idea whose it was.

Aya snapped out of it first, hands tightening about the hilt of his katana. Shifting slightly, flowing into a different stance natural as music flowing into a key change, he raised the sword, the blood-smeared blade gleaming slightly in the half-light. Youji let his hand fall from his lips, tearing his gaze from Takagawa: he turned to Aya, and saw nothing to comfort him there.

“Aya,” Youji heard himself say, “are you sure you want to—”
The redhead simply nodded. “Step aside,” he said, and there was no mistaking the authority in his voice. This has gone on long enough. “It’s time this was finished.”

Someone has to end this, and how else could it end? Aya moved—

“Aya-kun!” Omi cried: it could have been a warning, or a plea.

And much too late for afterthoughts, now. He moved, darting sure-footed toward Takagawa, and her ruined eyes met Aya’s for a single suspended moment, a moment that lasted no more than a fraction of a second and felt like a lifetime and, for Elizabeth Takagawa, it was. It was all the time she had left. The katana described an elegant parabola as Aya swung for her, removing her head in a single swipe.

It had been, at the last, a quick, clean death: it had almost even been clinical. After everything Takagawa had suffered, it was the least that they could do for her. That hadn’t been a mission, it had been butchery.

The woman’s head struck the floor with a soft, final thud. Takagawa’s body slumped again, hanging limply in its wire cocoon: Youji severed the wire from his watch and her corpse collapsed to the floor, pitching forward and lying, finally, still. Blood, thick and sticky as warm wax, shining slightly in the dim light, leaked slowly from its wounds. But finished now, finally: like a monster from a folk tale, something beautiful and terrible in equal measure, the only way they could kill Takagawa was by severing her head.

“Is it over?” Ken, breaking the sudden silence. What the Hell happened?
Youji nodded slowly. “Yeah, Kenken,” he said, and his voice was hushed. “Yeah. It’s over.” Not even she could come back from that. Nothing could.
“Oh,” Ken said simply, flatly. He sounded confused. He added, almost as an afterthought, “What was she?”
“Biokine,” Omi said, in the same low, hushed tones, as if he were talking in church.
Ken blinked up at him. “What?”
“That’s what they call them, Ken-kun,” Omi said, getting to his feet and holding out one hand to help Aya drag Ken back to his. “She was a biokine. Are you okay?”
“Uh. Yeah. I could kinda do with getting an early night, though…” Blinking slightly dazedly, Ken let himself be helped up, resting one hand on Aya’s shoulder to help himself balance, and Aya wrapped his arm about the boy’s waist, taking his weight. Ken placed one hand on his brow and started, quietly, to laugh.

Stooping, Omi collected up his scattered darts, slipping them back into the case nestling inside his jacket, then pocketed the butt of Youji’s forgotten cigarette. He smiled weary as a parent and shook his head slightly as he caught sight of Youji who, framed by the window, was quietly lighting another one, his face briefly illuminated by the flickering flame of his lighter.

Sighing, the teenager turned to leave; it was all he could do. The mission was over. There was nothing left but to go home.

Youji likewise. Cautious as a parent creeping from the nursery, Youji slipped from the room in his teammates’ wake and quietly closed the door after them, leaving behind him the corpse of a woman who, for all she had been warped and immoral, and for all her methods had been twisted, had dared to dream she could change the world. She had done wrong and known it was wrong: she killed, but she had told herself she did it for a reason. Some day, when she had learned how to help people to live instead of merely forcing them to their deaths, nobody would have to die like that ever again…

I just want to fix things, she had said. I want to help… Whoever she had been beneath the camouflage, her intentions at least had been good. She had wanted, some day, to help people to live: Weiss, Youji knew, couldn’t even claim that much.

“Come on,” Aya said. “Let’s go.”

Not when Weiss just dealt death, with surgical precision, and all the impassivity of a doctor.

-ende-