like drops of water, like planets, like magnets, like our skin

[vivememorleti]

Hearts were things beyond our ability to control.

Every time it rained, Kisuke would dwell on that thought. Such things had always been the purview of a mind like his own He'd liked little more than to wait for a warm evening, when the insects were particularly loud, and to sit out on the porch with his legs dangling, considering the heart.

He was busier in Darrow, but he still found the time to do nothing at all, which was when he would tend to get the really good thinking done. Tonight it just made him frustrated, so that eventually he made his way away from the window of his little apartment and out onto the streets, where the rain on the roads made everything an artful play of electric lights. The sort of realer than reality that tends to grace night scenes in movies. He appreciates it, and the puddles are no problem, with the wooden geta he wears made for the express purpose of rising feet above the elements.

The jittery feeling of escape having been driven from his joints, he moves to lean against a street lamp by a bus stop and fish for a smoke, when he catches the feel of a familiar soul. He hadn't been expecting to find Mike Pinocchio out here, but nor did he dislike the coincidence. In the mood that Kisuke was in, he could hardly think of a better person to happen past. Mike had given him a pleasant skin-crawling when he'd met him, and Kisuke liked to have his fix.

"Walking or taking ths bus?" he said, without turning his head to meet the man's face.

Comments

[forthedog]

He stops, though he doesn't turn. he instantly recognizes the voice. The kukri is evident at his hip - he doesn't bother with hiding it and never has with any of his weapons when he goes out - and he figures that when Kisuke sees it, it'll be pretty clear what he's here for.

"Walking." He does turn, then, giving the man half a smile. "Too early to get home yet. And I got a bike."

[vivememorleti]

Kisuke did not overthink his decision to follow Mike to wherever he was walking. The weapon on his hip was large enough to be obvious, and Kisuke did not suspect that a man like Mike, who he did not get the picture of as a person who pointlessly used intimidation, would have it so neatly on hand if he weren't of a mind to use it that night.

Kisuke left his pipe tucked away, instead turning to fall into step just behind Mike's shoulder, plucking his way alongside the other man with the steady tap of his pale wooden cane on the wet concrete. It trailed behind them, along with the scrape of his sandals. If Mike wanted more stealth, Kisuke assumed he would tell him tp peel away when it suited him.

"The picture of a person who owns a motorcycle is different where I come from. Usually youths that like the rebellion of fast cars but don't have the money yet to own them, or middle-aged salarymen who aren't married and like to take roadtrip vacations." He gave a soft snort of laughter. "In either case, a little incongruous, in my imagination."

[forthedog]

"Rebellion." He laughs softly, shooting Kisuke a glance. There's something about the sound of the cane that's pleasant, meditative. "Might be some of that. I did all my rebelling a while ago, though."

There's really nothing left to rebel against. He's a different kind of creature now.

"It was a gift."

[vivememorleti]

"I never had the chance for something like that," Kisuke said, voice musical with the quality of someone looking back on a quainter youth. "Rebellion wasn't an option, and I was in the position of power that made that the case, and I knew it. I questioned authority, but did exactly what it told me to do. Until I escaped from that power and learned that it could be preferable to have nothing of the sort. It allows a person the chance to test, and to keep only what really works. That's the good part about testing. You rebel against something. But you can test everything."

His grip on the curving handle of his cane tightened, turning his knuckles an even whiter shade of pale.

"Who gives Mike Pinocchio a gift of a motorcyle, and for what reasons, I wonder? Special birthday?"

[forthedog]

"His husband does." His faint smile transmutes very briefly into a grin. because that had been sort of perfect in a whole number of ways, and it also always strikes him as slightly funny. A motorcycle on the one hand, and land on the other. "For Christmas."

He fingers the handle of the kukri, more idle than anything else. He's alert, watching, but he's not in the mood to focus so much on hunting tonight. The simple act of wandering, of being a little closer to something both more and less than human, is pleasurable.

"As for the whole rebellion thing... I learned that it really depends on the kind of power."

[vivememorleti]

"Not really suited to the weather. Maybe that's nice, though. A gift that you can't immediately get the best use out of. Something that gets better with time. And memory, maybe."

Kisuke shrugged, quickening his pace only to pull closer to Mike's side. Now that he'd found conversation, he wasn't keen on letting it get away from him; though, Mike didn't seem likely to try. Which he respected. Kisuke knew well that he was not the sort of individual that most lingered in the company off, except to tolerate him when they were in need of something from him.

"There are a lot of kinds of power, aren't there? And none of them are least among the others. Even a power like 'kindness' can't be ignored. I replaced a kind woman once. For all of the talents I know that I possess, I was considered ever-inferior to that woman."

[forthedog]

"I wouldn't have thought about it that way. Not for a long time." He reflects, sometimes, on how simplistic his understanding of the world had been. He hadn't been stupid, he's never been stupid, but he had been ignorant, and it had taken years of violence to educate him.

And other things.

"Then I met someone. He believed he could save the fucking world by being nice to it. Least, that was what I thought at the time." He smiles again, and it's faint and more than a little sad, just for a moment. "Except now I think he was right. More right than me."

[vivememorleti]

"It's hard to save the world," Kisuke said, flicking a crushed orange soda can out of the way of the footpath with the tip of his cane. It was sent skittering into the depression of a gutter at the side of the sidewalk beside a soaking wet, discarded black glove. Some child had probably lost it, rushing after her parents. Something like that made a good story for it.

"Because the world doesn't give a shit about you, and death doesn't give a shit, and time doesn't give a shit, and god doesn't give a shit. But saving people is easy. Especially with a moment's kindness. One after another, they save us, that certain type of person. Even if they're otherwise cruel or capricious, all they need to do is extend us that one kindness and we have no choice but to be saved. I have a theory that those kinds of kindnesses have power because they don't take away our agency, but promise it to us. 'You can be a better person if you want,' or 'changing is your decision.'"

[forthedog]

"He was that for me." He speaks softly, looking half at Kisuke and half past and beyond him at something he can't quite see with his one good eye. He's remembering now, memory washing over him like a heavy, warm wave; it's always like this now, and he's made his peace with it. "Him, a few other people. He thought I could be better. He made me better. I loved him for that. I hated him, too. A little."

It was always so much easier to not hope at all. It conferred on one a kind of freedom.

He tilts his face up and lets some rain wash into his mouth. It tastes slightly oily, though that may be just his imagination.

"I don't think he'd think all that much of what I am now."

[vivememorleti]

"People change. They drift apart. Then they move on. It's a platitude, but it's truth." Kisuke gave a shrug, pulling his eyes away to stare into the middle distance, free hand fingering the poor shave job on his chin. After a hundred year absence, many things had changed when he'd finally returned to them. It might have worked out in his favor -- the jury was still out on that. But for better or worse, there was change.

"Anyone who believes otherwise is stark raving mad. Someone once made me better. I didn't love that person. From the start, I didn't trust that person. But he made me better, because he knew exactly what kind of person I was better than I knew myself, and he used it to his advantage to do a great evil. You've only got one choice when you meet someone like that in your life. Become a little better and a little worse in all the ways they don't expect."

[forthedog]

"Then I'd say I'm two for two there." He flexes his hands, feels the rain run between his fingers. He's not soaked, but he's wet, and not minding it. Like eschewing gloves when he works in the garden. The world, every part of it, right up against his skin.

Tom might have seen this coming. In the worst, darkest corners of his mind, he might have seen it, even if he never would have let himself believe it. So it's good that he can't see it now. Not because of any shame, but because he wouldn't have wanted to hurt Tom in that way.

Not in that way.

"What evil did he do?"

[vivememorleti]

"He understood that god didn't give a shit." He didn't quite avoid Mike's eyes, but never intentionally met them either. He had no need to gauge for a reaction to the words, no desire either to censor himself or to push the other man with the conversation. For the time being, it was just conversation, better than returning home to an empty apartment. The rain doesn't bother him, although it stains the thick silk of his jacket an even darker green, a shade of rich black more than anything.

It feels good, cool, between his fingers and the smooth and rounded wood of his cane.

"And judged that god ought to. Like they say, good intentions. It's not just paved with them. It's walled and roofed, and furnished too."

[forthedog]

He watches Kisuke in the process of answering, gaze moving over his features, down to his hands and back up again, gauging and amused by how difficult it is to gauge.

"You don't really do straight answers, do you?" One corner of his mouth creeps upward again. "Not that I'm complaining. Straight answers are so fucking boring."

[vivememorleti]

"I give straight answers when they're necessary and expedient," Kisuke said. "Which is seldom. I'm the sort of person who prefers to learn more than he gives away. Leading people to the answers is more interesting than handing them away. You learn a lot more when you let people come to conclusions on their own. It may not be anything of consequence, but life would be busier than the pace I like if all I ever did were things of consequence."

Brushing a fat drop of water from where it had collected to hang from the brim of his hat, he let it drift down the length of his finger before disappearing beyond the threshold of his sleeve.

"You don't seem to mind the rain. Sometimes I wonder if it can connect people's hearts the same way that it connects the earth and the sky."

[forthedog]

"That's..." Very romantic, he's about to say, except it strikes him that it's nothing of the kind. There's a deep pragmatism in the idea. Nothing that necessarily implies sentiment.

Rain is not lonely, melancholy, or dramatic. Rain is falling water. It serves a purpose. It has a nature.

"That's very interesting." Because it is. He turns a smile on Kisuke that's too thin and too blade-like to really be flirtatious. Though in another setting it might be. "Why, you feel some kind of connection right now?"

[vivememorleti]

Kisuke watched the expression, all edges. It did remind him of the expressions that had tended to grace Yoruichi-san's face, which only serves the curious purpose of endearing him to Mike, of all things. But that was the way Kisuke was; he couldn't thrive without an edge to run up against.

Nothing else provided the same satisfaction.

"I at least feel like there is nowhere I would rather be right now," he said, without any real fondness in his voice, despite the view he'd decided to take on Mike Pinocchio. It was not so much glowing approval as it was a perverse admittance. Darrow had not offered him a cause to believe in or a creed to follow. Despite Kuchiki Rukia's urging, he felt little fealty to some idea that he should be doing otherwise.

"You're a good place to rest. Which is, by my measure, the place that's giving me the most feedback. I was hoping you were hunting something, but if you were just looking for a good place to rest ... then I guess we are feeling connected."

[forthedog]

"I don't think anyone's ever said that about me before." He muses on it, fingering the handle of the kukri. He's been called a lot of things, described as a lot of things - some good, many horrible - but a good place to rest has never come even close.

Not to what people have said. But he's felt things.

"Dean might have thought that. He never said it." He rolls a bemused shoulder. "I'm not sure what I was looking for. But this... I like this okay."

[vivememorleti]

"Maybe someone should have."

Kisuke's lips quirk, delicate and pale as the rest of him. It's true that Dean might have thought such a thing, although Kisuke does his best not to dig too deeply into a mind like Dean Winchester's. It is too much like Kurosaki Ichigo's, a firm will, hiding raw, nasty instinct. He managed to keep himself at bay, as Ichigo had. But Kisuke could see it. The hollow hiding inside of him.

A symbolic one, in this case. But symbol too easily became reality in the landscapes that shinigami lurked in.

He reached out a finger, darting in to touch the edge of the rough and purposeful blade at Mike's side. Easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission; Kisuke seldom operated in any other manner. If he bothered with forgiveness at all.

As long as he could forgive himself, he could be happy. And he is an expert at bargaining with his own conscience.

"I was hoping to see you use something like this."

[forthedog]

"Really." Something pulses through him like deep sonar, seeking. The blade being touched feels more intimate than he might have expected, though he doesn't suppose he should be surprised; it's felt like an extension of his body, his will, more than once before.

He has a dim sense that what he's being asked is a good deal more complex than the words themselves imply.

"On what?"

[vivememorleti]

Lifting his fingers away, Kisuke inspects them, the skin barely shaved by the mild pressure he'd indulged in; enough to leave a visible mark, not enough to draw even a spot of blood to tinge the wetness of rain on his skin. Before he answers, he lifts them to his mouth. The rainwater tastes like metal; it's only fancy, and far-fetched, but Kisuke allows himself such things. The world of ideas is more interesting.

"I'm not sure that 'what' matters so much. Do you know much about kami?" he asks, but immediately moves on to an explanation, not waiting for an answer.

"Kami aren't like the gods of Western people. I don't mean this ignorantly; I only mean to give a broader picture. That's how I am. Start with the macro, work your way down. The western religions believe, largely, that a god is a god. A god is created a god, apart from nature. Supernatural. But kami means something different. Kami is a part of nature and always remains a part of nature. Something becomes kami; it is an adjective. After existing so long in nature, an object simply becomes so profound that it transcends its form. There's a wives' tale that any household object, if it's loved enough and lasts long enough, will become kami. Kami of inkstones. Kami of teacups. Whatever love and use is put in, so kami comes out, in the end. A blade is much the same. All blades were made for cutting, so all blades want to cut. They want to cut so badly, it hurts."

[forthedog]

He listens, almost as if he's being told a story, and as he does he feels more and more like it's a story that's nestling against him hard enough to gently bore a hole, working its way into a place that was already there for it.

"So what happens," he asks quietly, running his own fingers down the edge of the blade, "if it's not allowed to cut?"

[vivememorleti]

"The same thing you would do, if you weren't allowed to do the things that you were made for," he says, leaning closer to rest an arm against Mike's shoulder, mouth near his ear. It isn't any secret that he's telling. Anyone with a mind could go to the library, pick out a book, learn things like these. The importance to Kisuke is because he isn't talking about things written in books in libraries, but about himself. And if there were things that were in the nature of the kami of a sword, surely there were things that were in the nature of Urahara Kisuke, shinigami.

"Fizzle out or explode. I live to see things made better. People, machines, blades. That's why I was hoping to see you use that. In the hands of a craftsman, something always becomes better."

[forthedog]

"Don't usually have an audience for that," he says, his voice still low, almost a rumble. There's Spike, but even Spike doesn't see it all. Spike sees the savagery in flower but never in full, bloody bloom. And somehow he suspects that Kisuke might feel slight disappointment at a half measure when a full one might be had.

But there are some things he's not ready to give to anyone else. Not yet.

"I can't show you the real... craft." He turns his head, though he doesn't move back, their faces close. In its way, this is every bit as sexual as anything else he ever does, because he long ago stopped pretending that there was any line between sex and violence for him anymore. And he long ago stopped trying to keep from enjoying it. "But I can show you something close."

[vivememorleti]

He smells like a man -- the slightly sour, musky smell of a grown man, a living man. Kisuke hasn't been so close to one in some time Women were a different story, and even then, few and far between. It isn't his preference. There is an appreciation that he feels from it, from the immediacy of it. A soul had a powerful odor, each one unique, but the odor of a soul was detected with different senses than the scent of a living human being. Sweet flesh and sharp sweat.

It makes Kisuke feel distinctly not human, which is something that he chases after, some days. It isn't bad, feeling like the skull nestled into a pretty bowl of fruit.

"I would appreciate that. Very much. In whatever capacity you're willing."

He pulls away, only far enough to wait for an answer, and gives the brim of his hat a pluck, tossing a thin spray of rainwater into the air.

[forthedog]

"Okay." He smiles. It's a smile only a handful of people have ever seen, most of them no longer members of the community. No, he's not exactly used to an audience, but that doesn't mean the idea doesn't have its appeal.

He starts walking again, his fingers now curled loosely around the kukri's handle, turning down a darker street. In the darker corners of the city, it's only a matter of time. Usually not much time. It's like he has some kind of scent on him.

"Just curious: do you know about what Dean and I used to do? Did you get that little piece of info from him?"

[vivememorleti]

"I haven't asked Winchester-san about his personal life," Kisuke says, clutching, as ever, to surnames and honorifics, placing a veneer of detachment over everything. Self-preserving.

"I've only gotten what he has to offer himself, and what I can pull out putting the puzzle pieces in place on my own. It's a lacking picture. Especially because he didn't trust me at first. He's a clever man."

He remembers Dean, in those first meetings. Standoffish and wary. The last times that they'd met, Dean had treated him differently. Something had shifted, in his purview. Kisuke had becomes more oddity than threat. So it always goes.

He gives Mike a pursed smile. "I wonder if I'll be shocked to know?"

[forthedog]

"Would anything shock you?" He doubts it very much. But he goes on without waiting for an answer, and as he speaks he's peripherally aware of a presence, something unseen but with them, radiating malevolence and hunger. He smiles again.

"I hurt him. I hurt him as badly as he wanted me to, which was... bad. I thought I was doing him a favor, but it turned into a lot more than that. Way the fuck more."

His voice drops and becomes almost dreamy, as if he's slipping into a reverie. Which he is. There's a kind of nostalgia in it, a longing for what's past and can't be returned to. "I think he wanted to go back to Hell. So I took him there. Over and over. He was my... perfect victim." Finally, the words he's been trying to arrange around Dean to capture what he had been, what he had meant. "He was willing. He wanted what I was doing to him. What I do now... No one asks for it. And that's fun too, honestly, but him..."

He shakes his head slowly, half in a kind of wonder. "He gave me a way to cut."

[vivememorleti]

It would take a lot to shock Kisuke; a great fortune more likely than anything else. His mind is too bleak, after the last hundred years more than any of the others. So he answers Mike only with an outright grin that is the claw of a crescent moon on his lips. His dark eyes search the space around them for whatever it is that Mike has brought them to, eager as a hunting beagle waiting by.

A perfect victim, is it? A man who never allowed himself to lose would contain such a thing in his multitude. Maybe that is the face, he thinks, of the Hollow inside Dean. Maybe it is similar to whatever lurks in Kisuke as well.

"Everyone carries a shadow," Kisuke murmurs, as Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

He wonders at Hell. A different concept altogether from the jigoku that Kisuke had seen, which did not turn a soul to something like what Dean had in him. Which ravaged a soul and strained it and made it piteous until nothing was left; until it was clean, and pure, and could be born again, cleansed of its mortal sins through suffering. Suffering for thousands of years.

Not subjugation but transcendence, that is what Kisuke wants.

"Do you want to do that again?" he asks, too flippant for it to be a meaningless question from his lips. He watches and waits.

[forthedog]

Some deep instinct had led him to expect the question, so he's already opening his mouth to answer, unhesitating, when it comes out of the dark, its fangs bared and its eyes brilliant gold. It would be beautiful, if its face wasn't a twisted horror, and in fact it's still beautiful to him in a perverse way, because he's used to seeing Spike like that in what used to be their most intimate moments together, when there had been teeth on his throat and bloodflow and the completeness of complete surrender.

So he greets it joyfully, the kukri in his hand in just a little more than the time it takes to blink. He turns aside the lunge, only slightly knocked off-balance by the glancing blow of the thing's body, and he hacks the blade against its side. It whirls, snarling and coming at him again, but this time he slashes open its belly and it stumbles in a spill of slippery gut, bewilderment briefly passing across its face.

They always look surprised. Somehow.

Clumsily, it tries to pack it all back in, but its own momentum is now impossible to fight, and it grips him, snapping its teeth close to his throat.

And for a fraction of a second he stands down and lets it. Lets it sink its fangs into his throat, his head arched back and a wave of dark pleasure surging through him. It's nothing like with Neil and the knife, nothing so ecstatic and so soaked in love, but it's wonderful all the same, and he lifts his eyes and meets Kisuke's gaze just before he buries the blade in the side of its neck, spraying himself with its blood and his.

You see?

[vivememorleti]

Kisuke sees. He doesn't take his eyes off, wide to the point of pain under the brim of his hat with a strange sort of jealousy, unsure in which position he would rather be; under the teeth or under the knife. The emotion is pure fantasy; he has no desire to actually die. But saying this doesn't make the emotion any less powerful, and he has no intention of denying to himself that it's desirable, what he looks at -- that it races through his veins better and purer than any high he's chased or drug he's put in himself.

His hand grips around the curve of his sword, convulsing at the heat he feels from it. If he is jealous, Benihime is livid. She shrieks to be used, not to simply stand by; to fulfill her purpose. She wants, as Kisuke has said, to cut so badly she aches.

Is that the man in front of him, he wonders. Is he similar? Is Mike Pinocchio a blade also? Aragami. Not a god of death. A god of slaughter.

He pulls in a ragged breath, not realizing he'd been holding it. He holds the other man's eyes, catching the song of euphoria in them.

[forthedog]

For a moment his attention is gone from Kisuke and locked on the thing crumpling in front of him. But he's aware that he's being watched and it heightens everything, making his skin tingle with adrenaline and sending a hot fist punching into the center of his chest. He kicks its legs out from under it, drops into a crouch, and hacks at its neck again. Spike could sever a vampire's head in a single stroke, two at the most, and he's not that strong but he's strong enough. It takes three, and then with a gurgling scream it turns to dust.

And he's left there, spattered with blood and sweat, breathing hard, oddly bereft.

Slowly he straightens up and turns back, the kukri still clutched in one gore-slick hand. His lifts his other to his throat, feeling blood oozing sluggishly between his fingers. It's not a deep bite. He still has control over that much.

He grasps the look on Kisuke's face immediately and knows he didn't misjudge.

"Do I wanna do that again?" He smiles. "More than anything."

[vivememorleti]

The heavy sound of Mike's breath echoing in the tall walls of the alley is similar to the sound of a room empty but for a pair of lovers. It's a detached observation; Kisuke neither links what he's seen with sex nor believes it isn't a part of it. Between himself and the soul of the sword in his hand, disguised as a simple cane, an exchange might not feel complete without both. Passion. It's passion, all of it. If he has a shadow, the passion is the shadow, hidden away deep within him by analytical, colorless eyes, and a conscious mind that bargained and manipulated the world around it, like a game.

The world isn't a game, though.

Kisuke is relieved to think he may have found someone to draw that truth back out of him.

He lifts a thumb to his own face, smearing at a spray of blood on one long cheek with it and spreading it across white skin until it leaves only a pink trace. The alley reeks of it still; Mike's excitement, the fear of the being that he'd destroyed; of blood and the mineral, soil smell of entrails.

The wound on Mike's neck is still bleeding sluggishly.

"It's powerful when a man meets something which he understands so deeply is beyond his level," he says, coolness masking a slowly-burning delight in his belly. "And it is a reminder that 'god' is such a poor word. Awe. Of that which we don't comprehend, we stand in awe."

[forthedog]

He shakes himself slightly. He's still high on it, the metallic taste of the adrenaline in the back of his mouth, though his heart was not and is not racing. It never does. It beats at the same pace but harder, thudding, more of a punctuation than anything else. A kind of emphasis.

He drops his hand away from his throat and stares down at the blade, which is still dripping slowly. He has a stake, he could have done it cleanly. But he almost never does anymore.

"So what are you in awe of?" he murmurs.

[vivememorleti]

Kisuke takes in a slow breath, letting it out again, loud in the emptied alley against only the whisper and tinkle of the rain making its way slowly down the city, into puddles and drains. It isn't a bad atmosphere, the drizzle, turning everything gray but Mike and the splash of color on the blade of his knife.

"You. Something that is what it is. That couldn't be better without becoming something else. You're dancing right on that edge. Aragami-san."

He gives a bow of his head, though he keeps his eyes on the other man, not lowering his forehead.

"I appreciate the opportunity more than words can express. Asking for anything more seems like begging. I'm not above begging."

[forthedog]

"I met a demon once," he says, almost musing. "He said I was well on the way to where he was."

The rain is coming a bit heavier now, washing away the dust, and - he hopes - doing at least a little to wash off the worst of the blood. He's come home covered in it before. He's beginning to realize that there will likely be trouble with Neil on account of at least some of what he's done tonight.

But it can't be undone.

"Turns out I have a thing for begging."

[vivememorleti]

"He was short-sighted," Kisuke says, with another curl of his lips, a confection of a smile offered up to Mike, too earnest to be a simper and too crafted to be organic.

He thinks to push, maybe, for what he wants, but it's better to leave it at this. Maybe. This time, at least. As much as his urge is toward instant gratification, a thing waited for sweetly with anticipation is better, more valuable. And the more he might have the proper context to place Mike into, the more will be revealed of how lovely he is, in his way.

"Thank you for giving me something to dream about," he says, lifting a teasing finger to press it against the center of his lips, turning the words into a divulged secret. Lifting the opposite hand, he gave a sharp snap of long, pale fingers, sparking the air with red light before a blackness appeared behind his shoulder, a large round hole in the space, darker than the night alley.

"I like the rain. But once you're so wet, there's no getting any wetter. Better to crawl back home and watch it out a window. Can I drop you off anywhere?"

He leaves Mike with the offer as if he were speaking of nothing stranger than a lift in a mini-van, the incongruity intentional. Kuchiki-san is a creature of innate grace and gravity. Urahara-san is simply Urahara-san. It's worth communicating.

[forthedog]

He's neither offended nor especially surprised at not being asked for anything more. This stopped feeling vaguely like flirtation a good while ago and now it feels like something more than that, because flirtation is light and easy and this is dark, thick, soaked in blood. What the demon had said hadn't frightened him then and it doesn't now, but he's never stopped wondering. Never been able to let it go.

But the peace that always chases the last of the adrenaline is asserting itself, and he feels calm, quiet, and happy to let it all simmer for the moment.

"My bike," he says, glancing from the black rift to Kisuke without a trace of worry. "It's about a mile from here, near Gerard. Close would be fine."

But he pauses a beat, then: "What does that mean? Aragami?"