vivememorleti | all one-way sympathies

Even toward the end of winter, it got dark early, and Kisuke soon found himself in the back of the cafe, in the shop, sitting at a low table under dim gold lights that made him yawn broadly enough to rub at his jaw where it stretched umcomfortably. He hadn't had any after-hours customers all evening, and had decided eventually to do some of the paperwork from the cafe just so that the night didn't feel like a total loss.

There'd been no sound for some time beside the meow from across the building, and the scratch of his own pen on paper. The regular swish of cars back and forth on Darrow's streets outside. But it catches Kisuke's attention when one of the cars slows, and he looks up to watch it park nearby, a bright red thing that still manages to stand out between one gray Toyota and the next on Darrow's streets.

Putting his work aside, Kisuke dropped the pen he'd been chewing at idly as he worked to the desk and stood to cross the distance, parting some of the wooden blinds to better peer out of the gap between the slats.

Realizing just who it is, he doesn't bother to disguise his stare from the window, but moves to the door when Dean Winchester finally exits his car and crosses the street. He unlocks it, poking his head out. The air fogs his breath, grabbing it and pulling it away.

"You look like you've had it rough," he says, searching out Dean's face.

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Dean's mouth is still open when he's pushed ass over teakettle back into his body. Once fully seated in his own flesh, the first thing he does is look around, eagerness feeding the false hope that there might already be a sword waiting for him. Of course, there isn't, and Dean tries not to look too foolishly disappointed when he sits up.

"You're a hard guy to have a conversation with," he says once on his feet. "You know?" Dusting the grass from his own behind, Dean cocks his head. "Now what? We're not done for the day, are we?"

"You've still got," Kisuke says, pulling back his sleeve and holding out a hand with two fingers extended. "Two more steps before you reach the finish line. For today, I'm almost done annoying you, but not quite. You're right on that front."

Reaching into the pocket of his pants, he fishes for what he's looking for, until he feels it, slick and cool. Pulling it out, he holds it up to the light, looking very much like a hollow, glass marble, though that's not what it is.

"But I know. That I'm not an easy man to talk to. To understand. Or to get along with. But you have my thanks for at least trying to deal with such an unpleasant person."

Tapping the length of his cane against his thigh with his free hand, he steps closer, keeping the object in his fingers in plain view. "This is a shell. This is what you're going to forge your blade out of, Winchester-san. But right now it's empty. It's got no spiritual matter or energy inside of it. It has neither form nor power, that's up to you to provide. But in order for it to start gathering those things, it needs a seed. You have a normal human soul, so you don't have a lot of options. You need a scrap of something foreign. I'm always an option, or Kuchiki-san, but you've also got--"

Kisuke lifts a hand, resting it against one of Dean's shoulders. "Something going on over here that might be useful."

Dean blanches slightly. Stuck in any given space with another person, Dean expects to be the unpleasant one - it's weird to hear Kisuke claim that title, and it has Dean shuffling his feet.

"Not unpleasant," he murmurs, "Just not easy." But Kisuke is touching his shoulder, Castiel's mark long healed but livid beneath his sleeve, and Dean regains his focus. "Remnant of angelic grace," he says. One from a fitting donor, given Dean's new determination to empower himself. "Will that work?"

Gray eyes shuffle from the shoulder under his fingers to Dean's own in surprised assessment, thin brows drifting up a pale forehead beneath the shadow of his hat. He ddoesn't hear a charitable opinion often from those he works with. It's far from the trust that Kurosaki-san had eventually placed in him, but it's enough to make him, for a second, think of home.

"That should work fine," he says, lifting his hand away just far enough to glow with dull, reddish light, before an answering light snaked out of the body below it, writhing in the air like a ribbon on a breeze before Kisuke plucked it away like so much gauzey, silvery spider-web.

In a moment, it started to disappear into the marble-like orb, which shone faintly, even in the light of day in the cavern beneath his shop. A pretty little thing, Kisuke thought.

"Hold for a minute," he told Dean, sticking his hand with the shell in it out to him. "It would be simple and clean if that was that, but that shell is going to have to go inside you. I'm going to place it in your soul. It's going to be a little uncomfortable."

Without worrying about permission, Kisuke was already clearly working on the spell to do the placing, folding back one of his sleeves completely to reveal a bare arm. He unsheathed the cane in his hands only far enough to reveal a length of blade to neatly knick the pad of his left thumb on, before closing it again, a few drops of blood landing neatly on the ground before he started scrawling the strange sigils necessary for the spell up the length of his right arm.

"The really fun stuff in life usually is."

Dean holds the shell in the palm of his hand, mesmerized by the faint glow until Kisuke begins to draw. It turns his stomach, not the blood, but the sigils, calling to mind more than one deal Dean's made in his life that's gone wrong.

"How's it get inside me?" he asks, already regretting his own curiosity. He'll find out soon enough, and it will likely be as uncomfortable as Kisuke says and more, but it's a favorable distraction from the blood.

Rather than actually answer Dean's question, Kisuke gives a snort of amusement. There's no reason to explain what's about to be readily illustrated. In the moment the last line is drawn, the characters light with the same faint red glow that had appeared before. They disappear in its wake, as if sinking down into the flesh beneath them, and Kisuke reaches for the little round object in Dean's palm.

He lifts his arm, which gives a soft crackle, like a doorknob touched in a too-dry room, before he thrusts his arm into Dean's chest to the elbow.

It sinks in neatly, as if the body in front of him weren't solid, was no more consequential than water. Leaving the shell behind where it needs to be, Kisuke pulls out and rests his hand at his side, mouth a thin line. But only for a second.

"The explanation would've only sounded like a double entendre anyway."

It's no worse than the discomfort that preceded it - pressure in Dean's chest, the shallowness of his breath over the panicked skitter of his heart. No worse, but for the presence of Kisuke's fist in his chest elbow deep.

Dean exhales in relief when it's over, clutching one hand to the spot, but of course his flesh is whole. And now that freaky glowing shell is inside of him.

"Hardly my soul's first fisting," he says, rubbing. "Feel free to hit me with the entendre next time."

Kisuke gives a snort at Dean's response, dropping his arm to his side and doing his best to disguise the clench of overstimulated muscles within the wide sleeve of his haori. Predictably, the spell he used to place the object inside of Dean had put his own synchronization out of order. It's painful, but shouldn't last more than a couple of days.

Certainly a fine cost to benefit ratio.

"I like you," he says. "You're cheekier than the last guy. Men who can take a joke are so much easier to work with. Although, maybe not as fun to tease." He narrows his eyes in feline amusement before moving off toward the ladder and peering up to the pinprick of light at the end of the dark tunnel above.

"We're done for now. Eventually, there will be other things we need to do. For the time being, just trust that time will do its work. If you have any weird side effects, come find me. I'd like to say there shouldn't be any ... but I've only actually done this five times before."

all one-way sympathies

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