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The echoing bang of a gun, the splatter of gore on Kai's face, and the acrid smell of smoking flesh. A chunk of brain matter lands on his cheek. As it drags down, it leaves behind a slimy streak of blood - he's not sure if the burning feeling is from the warmth that comes with a fresh gunshot wound, or his own disgust.
This is not the first time Kai has failed a mission. This is not the first time his father has been forced to step in.
It will not be the last.
The man before him begins to slump forward; Kai has enough sense left in him to take a hasty step back, letting the body hit the ground with a familiar thump. The blood is already pooling at his feet. Kai grieves the loss of his shoes, but, still, he cannot bring himself to move further. His eyes are trained entirely on the corpse - the gasping mouth, the chasmal crevice in its skull, and the vermillion spilling out like a gushing fountain, like some freak of nature, soaking its hair and staining its once-white collar.
It is the lesser of two horrors. The greater reminds Kai of its existence with the frigid touch of metal on his sweat-laden forehead.
"Kai," Gashu says, pressing the muzzle of the gun firm against his son's head.
Kai's heart is pounding, slamming against the walls of his chest like a prisoner wronged. If Gashu shoots him now, he's sure he'll bleed like hell.
"Father," he says, desperation creeping into his voice. He lacks the composure to steady it - everything in him is too preoccupied with stifling the urge to wrestle his attacker down, just as he had been taught. "I'm sorry, father. I didn't- I don't know what happened, I- I was trying to-"
He dares to glance out of the corner of his eye. Bile shoots up in his throat - Gashu's giving him that disappointed stare he knows so terribly well. The kind that appears out of the darkness when he closes his eyes.
Pathetic, Kai hears in his head. You can't even form a proper sentence.
He can't tell whether his imaginings are in his father's voice or his own - the two blur together far too often.
A few years back, Kai might have lied. He’d have claimed the target had caught him off guard, overwhelmed him unexpectedly. These days, with his skill as it is now, such a story is implausible. Besides, there’s no point in dragging the process out. Gashu always sees right through him. He meets honesty with harsh retribution, and poor attempts at deception with what makes the former seem like mercy.
He swallows. "I couldn't do it," Kai rasps, mouth dry. Like a sinner in the confessional. "I'm sorry. I could not kill him."
"There is no point in repeating back to me what I have seen with my own eyes," Gashu scowls. He lowers the gun.
A shuddering breath of relief escapes Kai. After that, he resolves to repress any further noise.
"Apologies, too, are worthless to the organisation," he continues.
He's returned to his usual stance, hands clasped. All Kai can think is the gun is gone, repeating the phrase over and over in his head like a prayer.
"Worthless to me," Gashu adds, and it bites the way a bullet would. "I do not ask much of you, Kai. How much time and effort - how many of our resources have I dedicated to you and your training? How much have I sacrificed?"
Kai can't look at him.
"I've already given you all you need. I ask for so little back," he says. He turns up his nose, glowering down at Kai. "And, yet, you still fail me. Over and over."
Kai wonders if staring at the corpse, the abject gruesome nature of it all, a human dead at his feet, will be enough to distract him. He'll take - no, he hopes for - any awful kind of nausea, terror, or aching. Anything but the swirling guilt of being a failure of an assassin, and an even worse son.
It's in vain. He's grown numb to blood and guts - the only thing that still strikes fear in him is the idea of having it on his own hands. If anything, the cadaver is just yet another reminder of his inadequacy.
Gashu keeps on with his lecture as he turns on his heel to depart. He continues prattling on as Kai trails behind, tracking bloody footprints as he goes; as masked Asunaro mercenaries file past him, on their way to clean up Kai's mess. He’s sure they all hear snippets as they go by. No doubt that news of his latest misadventure would be gossip all up and down the organisation’s hierarchy. With how often it happens, he might’ve be surprised that they don’t tire of the same story.
But he’s Gashu’s son. Things are expected of him. All watch his every move with anticipation, and all see, all know, each time he trips, stumbles, falls, fails-
Ah. Perhaps that worldview’s a touch self-centred.
Kai listens to Gashu’s words, of course - it'd be suicide not to - but, frankly, the content of the speech is nothing different from his typical spiel. He could guess exactly what his father's going to say next, with great rates of success. Such is the bond of parent and child, he supposes.
He can't help but get the feeling that Gashu is growing tired of him. Maybe that should bring relief. Freedom, at last. It does nothing but instil a suffocating sense of dread into Kai. The fear that this is only a lull in the endless waves of his training - the calm before the storm, as it were - before his father cracks down again. And, worst of all: the fear that this truly is the end. That he'll have to live the rest of his life as a genuine, definitive failure - or die as one, should Asunaro grant him a coup de grâce.
He's silent as he follows Gashu out of the building, into the car, and back to the house.
He's less so when the inevitable punishment comes - he's sixteen (too old for screaming and crying) but even he can't help the involuntary yelps when his head collides with the hard cold of the floor, when his father yanks his hair with such force that his fist comes away with clumps of silky black between the fingers, and in the wake of a million other little penalties that Kai loathes to remember yet cannot forget.
"Gashu!" a voice calls, light and sing-song. His father stands upright and address the speaker. When his hold on Kai loosens and finally releases entirely, Kai crumples to the floor, clutching at himself.
“What’s your business?” Gashu asks, polite and mildly perturbed. “As you can see, I am currently preoccupied.”
“About that - I’m awfully sorry,” they say, not sounding very sorry, "but I'm afraid I have a prior arrangement with Kai!”
Through his blurring vision, Kai can just about make out the image of their brown dress shoes as they stroll closer. The voice is familiar, but the words are fading in and out as his head spins, so he struggles to pin down where he’s heard it from.
"So, I think that's enough for today, no?"
Gashu pauses. For a moment, Kai feels his father's eyes drilling into him, considering his options (he doesn’t know whether Gashu’s really looking at him, or if he’s just imagining the sickly feeling that comes with it).
Then, it's the click-clack of his shoes against the floor as he leaves. "Very well. Do what you will."
The door shuts. His eyes wander back into focus, and the newcomer bends down, looming over him. He flinches as they push a bloody strand of hair out of his face, and relaxes a little when he recognises theirs, realising the person in front of him is hardly a newcomer at all.
"Good afternoon," Sou Hiyori says, small smile ever-plastered on his face. "Not doing too well, are we?"
He extends a hand out to Kai. Kai grasps it like a lifeline. And then Sou's pulling him up (his strength would be surprising for his build if Kai had not seen it before, and if Kai were not the same), Kai's half-stumbling into him, and he's laughing lightly, catching Kai as he nearly tumbles over again. "Try not to get blood on my suit, will you? I've just cleaned out the last lot of the stuff!"
Kai manages a nod. He attempts to find his feet, only to feel Sou's hands on his shoulders, shifting Kai into leaning on him in a way that's a little more sustainable, and Kai, tired as he is, with his father as absent as he is, allows himself to give in. He puts his weight on Sou and lets his eyes flutter half shut, trusting that his friend will take him where he needs to go. Wherever that may be. He trusts that Sou will somehow know.
As he settles in, Sou's arm brushes against a freshly reopened gash on his back. Kai grits his teeth as he tries to suppress a more dramatic reaction, face scrunching up in agony.
Sou snaps to look at him, eyes wide. A pang of guilt joins the pain in his wound - it's not like Sou meant to. Although he knows Kai better than any of their other friends, it'd be unfair to assume he knows absolutely everything, down to the scars lining Kai's frame. It’s not his fault.
Sou adjusts his grip on Kai, arm pressing down hard on the wound. This time, caught in his thoughts, Kai isn't quick enough to hold back the wince, chest heaving with laboured breaths.
"Let's go get you cleaned up, alright?" Sou says, smiling wide as ever.
For what feels like forever, they're in the bathroom, Kai sitting motionless on the floor as Sou hovers over him with a first aid kit so ridiculously extensive it can hardly be considered 'first aid'. Its variety is not as ridiculous, of course, when one considers just what line of work the two teenagers both find themselves in. It's almost every day, in the latest hours of the night or the earliest of the morning, that Kai makes use of almost every facet of the kit in a shabby attempt to shape himself into something unbroken enough to face the world outside his father's house. It's a difficult task - especially when Kai has gone so long believing that his father and the organisation are all there is to life.
Sou lacks the same inexperience. He hums as he works, scrubbing blood, both wet and drying, off of Kai's face with a damp, warm cloth, wrapping wounds, and even going so far as to stitch up a particularly nasty, particularly fresh one.
Upon noticing a growing bump on Kai's head, he exits the room without warning, only to swiftly return with an ice pack. He fixes it onto Kai's head with a bandage as a makeshift headband, and chuckles at how silly he looks. When Sou shows Kai a mirror image of himself, with blood and bruises and a stupid-looking ice pack tied to his head, Kai manages a mildly amused exhale out of his nose.
Kai trusts Sou in matters such as these - there's always a medical, almost cold precision with which he goes about it. Of course, he's still susceptible to clumsiness - he pulls bandages tight enough to make Kai hiss through clenched teeth, meeting the pained response with an apology and a smile; he pours alcohol on still-bleeding wounds without warning, scolding himself for forgetting to say something beforehand after Kai gasps at the burning sensation (Kai shakes his head, telling Sou it's fine, it's his own fault, and that he should be able to handle it - Sou gives him a curious smile in return); he accidentally elbows Kai in places plagued with aches too recent, leans on already-forming bruises, and, to be frank, his stitching technique is one of the most brutal Kai's been subject to.
All this, indubitably, is borne of the fact that Sou doesn't have any way of knowing Kai's limits the way Kai himself knows them. Kai understands - he's all too familiar with people overestimating his tolerance for pain, for cruelty, and the disappointment that follows his inevitably underwhelming performance. All this, indubitably, is a kindness compared to what his father would've continued to do, had Sou not interrupted.
The vacant look in Sou's eyes sometimes sends a chill down Kai's spine, but he sees his own blank stare in the mirror and figures it's something he can't judge him for.
Kai's lying on the floor. His head's strategically placed in the shower area of the bathroom, and Sou's crouched beside him, holding the showerhead over Kai's hair. He watches with a small smile as the blood encrusted in it streams out, runs pink with the soft white lather of shampoo, then translucent, and finally slips down the drain.
Sou clicks his tongue and asks a question he probably already knows the answer to. "So, how did your mission go?"
Kai had been hoping he'd avoid the subject entirely, but he's not surprised it came up. If nothing else, he’s been expecting it enough to keep his voice steady as he answers. "Unsuccessful," he replies, curt as possible.
Sou hums noncommittally. "Shame," he says. He reaches down to pick an exceptionally stubborn speck of dried blood out of Kai's hairline. "Are you upset about it?"
Kai's eyes flicker to Sou's face, hoping to decipher his purpose. Sou is staring directly back at him. He averts his eyes again. "There is nothing I can do other than reattempt next time."
"You're really not upset?" Sou asks, placing his chin in the palm of his hand, like Mai does when someone's returned from a different class with the promise of gossip. Unlike her, however, there's no thrill of excitement in his expression - his mouth's a small, thin line. “How many next times have there been? How many more will there be?"
Kai blinks. "I do not know," he says. "There is nothing I can do."
"Shame, really," Sou repeats, switching the showerhead from one hand to the other. There's the splat of shampoo on Kai's head again - Kai reaches up to rub it in himself, but Sou pushes his hand aside. "Do you know what it is? What it is that stops you?”
A pair of vivid green eyes gaze expectantly at Kai. He lies there wordlessly.
“Hmm... it's surely not physical prowess," Sou murmurs, seemingly talking to himself. He scrubs the shampoo in, fingernails rubbing raw against Kai's scalp. "Fear, perhaps. But fear of what? I'd have thought your fear of Gashu would outweigh all else, and while that appears true enough, it's not enough to drive you to something as base as murder.” He laughs humourlessly. “Well... killing."
He pauses, a cog seemingly turning in his brain. "Don't tell me," he says, expression twisting into a grin. "Morality? Now, where did you pick that up from? Certainly not your parents, nor your environment,” he scoffs. “All points in the opposite direction, and yet, somehow, you..." He trails off.
Sou grips Kai's head with such vigour, it’s as if he’s trying to feel the convolutions of his brain through the thick barriers of flesh, skull, and all.
He sighs, smiling. "It's a real shame you're Gashu's son."
And, as if nothing had happened, he bounces back a little and returns to running the showerhead over Kai's hair. “Look at me, rambling away like nobody's business!" he laughs, waving a hand. "Ignore me, won't you?"
Kai's admittedly a little put-off, but there's no noise he recognises like the sound of an Asunaro agent who just ran their mouth. For the sake of his friend (and for the sake of his own sanity), he agrees. "Very well," he says, keeping his face expressionless as ever.
For some reason, that seems to catch Sou more off-guard than calling out his peculiarities would have. His giggling slows to a halt, replaced with that small, funny smile. "You are an interesting one, aren't you?"
He bounds back up to his full height, reaching over to turn the water off and put the showerhead away. Kai gathers his hair up, squeezing out the excess liquid before getting up to rub it down with a towel.
"Is it a conscious thing?"
Kai looks at Sou, expectant of elaboration.
"Why, this!" Sou exclaims, gesturing at Kai's face. "You don't react to much - but there are a couple of things you can't quite seem to repress your response to!"
"Should I be more reactive?" Kai asks, his eyes drifting over to the bathroom mirror. He looks far better than he did an hour (a few hours ago? maybe it had only been thirty minutes), but the bandaid hiding a cut above his eyebrow and the bandages wrapped taut around his arms remain quiet reminders of what lies beneath.
Sou's eyebrows shoot up, silent for a moment. And then he’s bursting into laughter, slapping Kai's back in amusement. "No, no, not at all!" he chuckles, wiping away what is probably a false tear. He composes himself. "No," he says, smiling over Kai's shoulder, "you're wonderful just as you are."
As with all the strange things he says, Sou says it like it’s nothing at all. But it’s enough to make Kai halt, breath hitching.
How long had it been since he had heard something like that?
Had he ever?
Sou frowns. "Well, chop chop!"
Kai furrows his brow at the sudden volume - Sou's grin returns.
"Dry your hair, go put something fresh on, make yourself presentable... We've places to be!"
"Such as?" Kai asks, slowly placing the towel on the counter.
"Oh, Kai, you awful, terrible friend!" Sou says in mock horror. Kai frowns. "Everyone's at Kurumada's house today... How could you forget?"
Kai freezes - and then he's sidling past Sou to make the brisk walk to his bedroom to find a changshan not stained even darker with damp patches of blood. "How late are we?"
"Twenty-three minutes," Sou calls cheerily. "I texted saying you were running a last-minute errand for your father, and I decided to help." Not entirely untrue. "Still, it's rude to keep them waiting, right?"
His voice echoes through the emptiness of the Satou household. At this point, Kai tunes him out, focused purely on the task at hand - perhaps his current tendency for tunnel vision is what makes him such an unskilled assassin. He makes a mental note of the self-observation, and tucks it away for later.
They arrive at Kurumada's twenty-seven minutes later (Kai has expertise in speed, but they lose a little time when Sou spends a good minute in the mirror fluffing his scarf; besides that, the duration of the journey itself is somewhat non-negotiable), leaving them at a not-so-nice round number of fifty minutes late.
Sou rings the doorbell and steps back. There's a little commotion inside ("Naomichi, dear! Should I let your friends in?" and Kurumada yelling back, "I'll get it, mom", speeding down the stairs) and the sharp sound of a window swinging open above them. Sou hums absentmindedly. Kai snaps his head up, eyes flitting around wildly for the source, and settles back into himself when they land on it.
"Fashionably late as always, I see," Keiji says, leaning lazily against Kurumada's bedroom windowsill.
"Keiji," Kai greets.
Sou laughs. "How long ago did you arrive, I wonder? Five minutes? Maybe ten?"
He huffs, pulling slightly back from the window. "I'll have you know it was twenty."
"Kai!" Q-taro bursts into view, nearly sending Keiji tumbling out of the window as he shoves past. It's probably Alice's hand that grabs him by the collar and pulls him back in (yes, definitely Alice, Kai thinks, as a voice shrills, "perhaps it would be in our best interest to just wait for them to come upstairs?!") since Mai simply slips past him, giggling into her hand all the way. She gets out a quick "Hiii!" before their attention is stolen back to the door in front of them.
"Hello, Naomichi!" Sou says gleefully.
Kurumada glowers - there's a chorus of snickers from above. "You coming in or not?"
"Sooo cold!" he laments. "Is that how you treat a guest?"
"I do it special just for you pricks," Kurumada deadpans, stepping aside to welcome them in regardless.
His expression cracks into a smile as Kai follows Sou in, clapping him heartily on the back. Kai's reached the liminal state of unfeeling that follows the worst of injuries, but it’s recent enough that he still has to force down a wince. Luckily, Kurumada doesn’t notice. "Good to see you, man."
Kai nods in acknowledgement.
On days closest to what Kai might consider normal, there's some value to be found in the quiet that follows failed missions. Bouts of silence too long will have his father's words ringing in his ears all over again, but, when his mind and body are numb with agony, a stillness like death is all Kai desires.
And yet.
It'd be unfair to say he's unhappy with the current arrangement. The constant stream of noise, conversation bouncing back and forth, is nearly as stupefying as deadening silence.
There remains the nagging voice, whispering in the back of his head that this is only transient, nothing but a distraction; at the end of the day, he will have to go home and face himself and his sins and lack thereof. The idea makes its home in the pit in his stomach.
He figures the terror will build regardless. He figures he might as well let the sound of the people who call him a friend drown it out, even if it's only for so long.
