Puppet Master

For dinner that night, Yohji made a Western breakfast. He scrambled eggs, toasted and buttered bread and even made pancakes. He whistled while he cooked, sprinkling the ashes from his cigarette into the empty egg shells piled on the counter. Ken came in around five and peered critically over Yohji’s shoulder before going to the cupboard and taking out four dinner plates.

Yohji smirked and flipped a pancake high in the air before catching it with the pan. He tipped the pan over a plate stacked with pancakes and the golden-brown flapjack slid right onto the pile.

"Sweet and easy," Yohji said with a pleased smile as he took the plate of pancakes and the plate of eggs over to the kitchen table. "Breakfast for dinner, nutritious and delicious."

Ken lifted an eyebrow and scowled. "What are you talking about?"

Yohji just smiled casually and went over to the counter. He held out a hand just as a browned piece of bread shot out of the toaster. Yohji caught it and placed it on a plate before bringing it all over to the table, too.

"All ready," Yohji announced happily.

Ken nodded and walked out of the kitchen to go get the others for dinner. Yohji continued smiling, appearing to be no less than completely pleased with himself, like that cat that got the cream.

Inside, he was still crying. Somewhere, Schuldig was comfortably tucked in and keeping his fist around Yohji’s mind, directing his every word, gesture and breath. He was no longer himself, but a strange mixture of Yohji and Schuldig, Weiß and Schwarz, master and slave, cat and mouse. In his mind he heard two voices when he spoke, a German accent overlaying his own voice. He felt sedated, his body calmly running on automatic drive while in his mind he was snarling and snapping at the sticky web of a spider pinning him down.

Little mouse, do you hear it? Schuldig laughed inside Yohji’s head. Upstairs. Hidaka is asking the boy why he does not want to come down for dinner. Why do you suppose the young one would be reluctant to face you, eh, mouse?

A dizzy sensation like falling and flying tugged Yohji’s brain out of his head and he was upstairs, hanging in Schuldig’s psychic grip on the edges of Ken and Omi’s thoughts. Schuldig was listening in and had brought Yohji along for the ride. Yohji could not make out words, only emotions, flashes of shame and confusion. Indeed, Omi did not want to come down for dinner and have to face Yohji, his shame over this afternoon too great, but he would not tell Ken why he did not want to eat. Ken was confused and frustrated and working hard to convince Omi to come down.

A red glow like the stained sky at sunrise passed nearby and Yohji moved slightly away from Ken and Omi, straying ever so slightly. Aya—yes, it was Aya moving down the hall, and his mind was like a blaze that burnt the aura of Yohji’s awareness. He squinted as it moved past him; strained and reached out, yearning towards it.

No-no, not too far. He was snapped back like a dog on a leash. Schuldig yanked Yohji’s mind away from the warmth and back to the shadowed winter of his own psychic grip. Mm, the feel of Schuldig’s caressing fingers of thought changed, becoming curious. Interesting, ne? Fujimiya…he burns brightly for one without the power. Or perhaps it is only through your perception that his fire is so great, hm?

"Yohji?"

Yohji was slammed back into his body and he blinked up at Aya’s questioning face.

"Aya," Yohji gasped, disoriented and spinning for a moment before Schuldig tightened his fist and pulled him under control.

"Are you all right?" Aya asked, a surprising hint of concern lowering his voice.

"Fine," Yohji said with an easy smile. He held his hand out over the table, displaying the spread. "Soup’s on. Metaphorically speaking."

Aya watched him for another moment, brow furrowed, before sitting and taking a piece of toast.

Yohji helped himself to a few pancakes and drowned them with maple syrup. It was silent as they ate. Aya was not usually a big talker, but tonight his body language was closed, tight, obviously withdrawn. Yohji smirked at the awkwardness, responding to Schuldig’s amusement at the stoic assassin’s evident discomfort. Clearly the redhead was still uneasy as a result of Yohji’s sexual aggression that afternoon. What had to be bothering him the most was his inability to claim the higher ground; he had, after all, responded to Yohji’s kisses, had loosened in the embrace, had given in. The other was surely seeing his weakness as a capitulation, a failure—as Aya was wont to view any limitation—and that, too, must be eating him away.

The overlapping in Yohji’s mind split for a moment, allowing him brief emotion: sadness for Aya’s agitation and probable regret. An overwhelming sensation of loss.

And in that split second where Schuldig allowed him his own thoughts, Yohji lowered his eyes, looked away from Aya and stifled a cry.

Somehow, Ken talked Omi into coming down for dinner and the four teammates ate in utter silence but for Ken’s intermittent enthusiastic chatter about the children he coached in soccer. Yohji met Omi’s eyes twice and smirked at the boy’s consequential wince. The boy desperately avoided looking Yohji’s way, even going so far as to stare up at the ceiling when asking for the pancake plate, which was directly in front of Yohji. Yohji passed it into Omi’s outstretched hand with a grin, ignoring Ken’s curious gaze.

After dinner, Yohji left the kitchen, leaving it to the others to clean up. He heard the back door open and looked just in time to see Aya’s boot disappear outside.

Yohji went up to his room to shower and get dressed for the night. He put on red leather pants that fit him like a second skin and a black silk shirt that laced up with red ribbon. He tied his hair back with a scarlet ribbon, then repainted his nails to give the crimson a liquid shine. He painted eyeliner around his lids and slipped into a pair of soft leather shoes with pointed toes and three-inch heels. He regarded himself in the mirror, smiling at his own beauty. He tucked a stray wisp of hair behind an ear, making sure that he was beautiful in every way because Schuldig wanted to go out and have some fun in his body, and Yohji had no choice but to want the same.

Just as Yohji was ready to leave, his bedroom door slammed open and Ken rushed into the room. He pushed the door open with a loud crack behind him and glared right into Yohji’s eyes.

"What the fuck did you do to Omi?!"

Yohji tilted his head back a little so that Ken’s burning brown eyes no longer filled his vision.

"Hm," Yohji replied, again hearing the other voice in his mind. He talked and walked and danced as a puppet beneath Schuldig’s controlling strings. "Well, I’d say you know, or else you wouldn’t be so clearly…worked up."

"Worked up?!" Ken echoed incredulously. He ripped the kerchief from his head and threw it to the carpet.

"So the kid squealed, did he?" Yohji asked, stepping back and leaning casually on his dresser.

Ken stared in amazement. "I finally got it out of him after sitting with him and drying his sobbing tears for the last hour! Jesus Christ, Yohji, I can’t believe it!"

Yohji sighed and examined his nail polish, looking for bumps or nicks.

"You—you—you—"

Yohji cut off Ken’s tiresome babble. "I gave the kid a backrub. What, the kid’s at his sexual peak. I rub his back, maybe give him a little feel, he comes all over himself, and it’s my fault? He’s seventeen years old, Ken. A stiff breeze gives him a hard-on."

Ken stared, mouth agape. He shook his head, and his eyes narrowed. "I knew you were a slut, but I never thought you would stoop to molesting an under aged boy—and one that looks on you as a friend, too! God, you’re lower than I ever knew."

Yohji moved before Ken knew what hit him. He bodily slammed Ken against the wall and tented his own body over him, resting arms on either side of the brunet and pushing his knees into the other’s thighs. Ken cried out and Yohji smacked him on the mouth.

"You jealous, Kenny-kun-kun?" Yohji whispered, leaning close to Ken’s ear. He snaked his right hand down between them and, tightening his grip to hold Ken captive and pinned to the wall, he cupped his fingers around the slack bulge in Ken’s jeans. The smaller man jerked in Yohji’s arms and tried to get away, but Yohji had him trapped.

"Yohj—"

"Jealous?" Yohji cut off Ken’s cry. "That it was me, feeling the kid up, and not you? Me, getting him hard?" Yohji moved his fingers and unzipped Ken’s fly, slipping his hand in to get a better hold on the other’s cock. He caressed and squeezed and fondled until Ken’s erection strained his boxers and then he worked his fingers faster. "Me, getting him off, making him come? Are you really so repulsed by the idea of sex with an under aged boy, Ken? Mm?"

"Yoh—" Ken choked, cutting off as Yohji squeezed. Ken’s arms strained hard against Yohji’s but he was pinioned, unable to get away no matter how forcefully he pushed. "Fucking let—" he gasped, shivered, "—let me go…"

"Doesn’t feel like you want me to," Yohji said with a grin. He leaned forward and, just as he caressed the head of Ken’s cock, feeling a small wetness there, he licked Ken’s lips and whispered, "Are you so angry with me for fucking with the kid, Ken, or are you just angry because it wasn’t you?"

Ken cried out and he came. Yohji pulled his hand out of Ken’s pants and wiped it on Ken’s T-shirt. He flicked Ken’s chin, hard, and smirked.

"There. Glad we could talk about this." He released Ken, who immediately held out his hands defensively and moved away from the wall. Yohji ignored him and opened his door, turned out his light, and left. He went down the hallway, whistling again—it was a German song, a cheerful melody. He thought that if he tried hard, he might even remember the words.

It was past three in the morning when Yohji came home. He peered out the divided window set in the door, looking out on the darkened city street for a long moment. The moon shone through the glass panels, casting the silver light in triangles over his body—the moon beams shaped by the form of the window panes.

He turned away from the door and the fabric of his open blouse tickled his chest and sides. The red ribbon that he had used to tie the shirt was threaded through the small holes along one edge. He tugged on one end thoughtfully as he listened to the quiet house. He heard nothing more than the ticking of the kitchen clock, the creaks of a settling house, the muffled mewling of one of the many strays Omi had taken in, but he knew that he was not the only one awake.

The blaze of Aya’s mind was red heat waves trickling down the staircase and dripping through the ceiling. Yohji licked his lips and bit his lower one. He had stepped back into his own mind over an hour ago, drawn from the shadowed corners of the psychic exile Schuldig had confined him to when the mental leech had been satisfied with the perversions to which he had subjected his unwilling host. Physically sated and sore, tortured and abused, Yohji had been given back control as Schuldig retreated, tired and satisfied. Yohji had been left in the midst of a pack of half-human, half black leather beasts encased in steel and chains. He had fled from groping, bleeding hands and ran a mile before he stopped and saw that his hands bled, too.

His mind was blessedly draped in shadows and he thanked a god he once loved that he could not remember what he had done—what had been done to him. He knew that he would check himself over in the morning light and find more scrapes, bruises, and perhaps other evidence of the evening.

Frightened and disgusted though he was, Yohji had been relieved to have his mind and his body back. He was the puppet whose strings were severed and he fell sharply to the ground, free but not uninjured. The light of Aya’s mind seeping into his awareness scared him, because he had thought that Schuldig was gone for a time, leaving him alone in his mind. That he could still sense his teammate through some psychic sight meant to Yohji that the German mind-reader must still be in his brain, fingers dug into the gray matter and riding it high and hard.

Yohji tried to look away from the red glow of Aya’s thoughts and back towards the cold, impersonal light of the moon, but he could not fight its allure. He drifted towards the staircase and was climbing it before he had even made the conscious decision to move.

Walking down the upstairs hallway, Yohji saw a weak bar of light beneath Aya’s door, unnecessarily confirming that the redhead was still awake.

Yohji paused with his hand on the doorknob and sent a soft, beaten, cowed query into the silence of his mind. Schuldig?

There came no answer, but of course, that meant nothing. Still, Yohji could not ignore that intense flame. He courted it, flirting at its edges like a moth dancing around a candle flame. He turned the knob slowly, feeling rather than hearing the mechanisms click as the door opened. Aya was looking at him when he entered the room.

"Yohji," Aya said, face and tone expressionless.

The flickering light Yohji had seen in the crack under Aya’s door had been shed by the multiple candles the other had lit all around his room. There was a stick of incense burning in a curved piece of wood on the dresser, emitting a sticky-sweet smell that clung to Yohji’s nostrils and made him cringe. The room was warm, the air thick and scented with the cloying sweetness of the aromatic smoke.

"Aya," Yohji said back, meaning it to come out casual and companionable but forcing it out through a suddenly tight throat in a high, questioning voice.

Violet eyes regarded him unblinkingly and Yohji tried not to look away.

"What is it, Yohji?" Aya asked calmly, neither plaintive nor impatient.

Yohji exhaled on the soft sound of a breath and pressed the tips of the fingers of his left hand to Aya’s dresser top. The polished wood was smooth under his skin. The smell of the incest clogged his nostrils and his vision was clouded in the dimness of the candlelit room, but he could hear Aya breathing; the quiet rush of inhale and exhale filled his head and made him dizzy.

"Tell me what’s wrong."

Yohji started and half-turned to see Aya standing at his elbow. The other had moved so silently across the room that Yohji had not heard him coming.

Aya slowly lifted his hand to Yohji’s cheek and ran his knuckles on the sensitive flesh there.

Yohji’s lips trembled and he stared at Aya. Aya was touching him, Aya’s skin was on his…and God he was afraid. In his mind’s eye he saw Omi’s stricken expression as Yohji left him; he saw the helpless anger and reluctant pleasure reflected in Ken’s face while Yohji held him in place. He stared down at his hands—his hands, his hands—at his crimson nail polish and the familiar rope of scars wrapped around them and wondered what they would do. He wondered what Schuldig would use Yohji’s hands to do to Aya when the Schwarz decided it was time to play again.

"I have to go," Yohji said, making a small movement to turn towards the door. Aya held him in place by cupping his hands around the brunet’s neck.

"Why?" Aya asked quietly.

"Because I’m scared," Yohji whispered so silently that his voice was almost inaudible. "Because I want you."

Aya’s eyes widened minutely and he tilted his head a fraction of an inch. "Good," he said, making the closest sound to a laugh that Yohji could remember hearing the stoic redhead make. "Because I want you, too. And I like getting what I want."

Yohji had to chuckle, despite the fact that his hands trembled as he lifted them to Aya’s hips. He slipped his fingers under the fabric of the redhead’s shirt and rested them on Aya’s bare skin.

"I can’t—" he started, but Aya placed his fingers over Yohji’s parted lips, cutting him off.

"Hush," Aya said in a low voice that made his chest rumble under Yohji’s traveling hands. Aya leaned forward and caught Yohji’s lips with his mouth, kissing him lightly. Yohji teetered on the edge between fear and desire. Then he felt Aya’s tongue and he shoved the fear to the far corner of his mind where he went when Schuldig pushed him aside.

Before that afternoon when Yohji had jumped Aya at the lunch table, they had only kissed twice. The first time had been a moonless night on the roof of their apartment building after Yohji had killed Noi. He had been sitting on the ledge, hugging his knees and telling himself that it had been Noi that he had killed, and not Asuka. Asuka had been long dead. Aya had come up and sat beside Yohji in silence for hours before reaching over for a clumsy, wet kiss. After they parted, Aya left without saying a word and they never spoke of the incident. Yohji knew that Aya did not know how to give comfort, had taught himself too well to forget the way of normal human interaction. Aya had cared enough about Yohji’s pain to want to console him, though, and had given succor in the only way he knew.

The second time they kissed had been during that debacle with the American Army when the false Persia had tried to turn Weiß against each other. They were separated and unsure of their plan, unsure of Manx’s clues, unsure of everything. Yohji and Aya had reached out for each other simultaneously, with an unspoken need for solace and reassurance. When they moved away from each other they had fallen into a comfortable silence and had sat together on the sofa until it was time to hunt down Ken and Omi.

Both times the kisses had been a little awkward and too desperate to continue for long. They were direct reactions to semi-cataclysmic occurrences and only lasted for the duration of whatever burst of emotion had prompted them.

This time, Yohji was trapped in the web of a deadly spider and he was desperate and in need of comfort—but there was nothing clumsy or awkward about the way his lips met Aya’s.

They kissed long and wet and warm to the music of deeply heaving breaths and the soft smack of lips and tongues and the moans of two boys wrapped in each other’s arms.

Somehow they got Aya’s shirt off over his head without parting for more than a moment and then the redhead—surprising Yohji with the force of his kisses—steered them over to his bed.

Yohji’s hands were busy playing in the ridges and valleys of Aya’s chest and hips and the hard jutting edges of his pelvic bone. In his eagerness and impatience to touch more of Aya, Yohji undid the other’s loose slacks, pulled them and his underwear down, then tumbled the both of them onto Aya’s bed. Yohji folded his still-clothed legs and arms around Aya’s naked body.

They lay on their sides facing each other as they kissed. Aya’s hands kept drifting across Yohji’s body to touch his face, his shoulder, his chest, his hip. Aya slid his hand under Yohji’s open blouse and traced a circle around one hard nipple. Then, as Yohji moved his lips along Aya’s cheek and nipped lightly at the flesh there, Aya pressed his fingers lightly on Yohji’s closed eyelids.

And then Aya’s hand was on Yohji’s zipper, pulling at the metal tab and undoing the button at the waist. Yohji’s breath hitched at the pressure of Aya’s fingers brushing Yohji’s erection through his leather pants, and it made him hesitate. He reached down, though, and took Aya’s hand, moving it to the side. He ignored Aya’s questioning gaze and the hurt confusion in his eyes, focusing all his attention on the other’s sweet-tasting lips.

Yohji intensified his kisses, suddenly desperate for Aya. He felt a gasp against his mouth and the hands gripping his shoulder and hip tightened. Yohji stifled a cry, pulling Aya against him, wanting nothing more than to burrow inside the pale, warm body against his and hide and be safe and be part of Aya. He dug his nails into flesh, tangled their legs together, devouring Aya’s lips and tongue and skin in anxious fervor.

Because Yohji was scared. Because Yohji wanted Aya. And what would Schuldig do with that desire? Yohji’s insane Puppet Master had already promised that he would focus his attentions on Aya some time in the near future. Yohji knew that Schuldig would love making him hurt the one he wanted all because mental mind-fucking got him off. What sexual perversity would Schuldig force upon Aya through Yohji? Yohji exercised the only control he had at the moment, keeping Aya from taking things a step further—though Yohji wanted him to, badly—because he could not be sure of what he might do.

Their kisses grew slower, longer, languid. Then, they were simply holding each other and resting their faces against one another’s. Soon, exhaustion and the soft sound of Aya’s breathing lulled Yohji to sleep.

Yohji awoke and gently slid out of bed to avoid waking Aya. The room was dark, only one candle still burned. He searched the floor for the boots that he could not remember discarding and padded lightly out of Aya’s room, closing the door softly shut behind him. He walked quietly down the hallway, avoiding creaky boards, and then down the stairway.

Once downstairs, he brushed a thick lock of brown hair out of his eyes and bent to put his boots back on. Then, he left the house through the front doorway and walked straight to the street where his jeep was parked near the curb. He started the car and drove away from home, keeping a constant speed and driving calmly through the mostly deserted streets of the early morning city.

Yohji smoked a cigarette and drove serenely out of his neighborhood, turning right and left and left and right again. He did not recognize the houses and businesses around him, was not sure where he was, but drove tranquilly on. When he reached his destination, he parked, got out of the car, and crossed the street to where Schuldig was waiting for him.

"Good little mouse, that comes when it is called," Schuldig said with a laugh, dropping a cigara to the ground. Yohji did not respond, only moved silently where Schuldig gestured and followed the Schwarz into the deeply shadowed interior of the building.