5. The Heart's A Stubborn Muscle

Just let go.

Tetsuya trembled, every fibre of himself poured into the task of maintaining his hold over Masato’s mind, repeating the message until it was indelibly seared into the other man’s psyche. He hadn’t known this was possible until now. The bloodbond’s mental warding could be overcome. It was by no means easy - he felt like he was pushing past a haze of indefinable redness every time he tried to get into Masato’s mind. There was something - someone - lurking in that haze, but whoever it was, they hadn’t been able to interfere. He’d chosen his angle wisely. There was a way into every mind, and he’d found Masato’s. Now all that remained was to push him over the edge.

“No… this can’t be real. I didn’t… I didn’t kill you,” Masato murmured, swaying on his heels, eyes unfocused. Still fighting back, even after all the terrible revelations? Impressive. And also infuriating. Tetsuya snarled, forcing his mind into a scalpel’s edge, peeling away layers of history and identity from Masato’s consciousness. His stubborn sense of duty, his self-indulgent view of himself as a willing sacrifice, his conditioning as an Auditor and killer - Tetsuya coldly excised these, leaving Masato’s self bare and vulnerable.

“This is who you are, Ikeda. This is what you’ve made of yourself. Murderers and thieves who ruin everything they touch, you and your father and your fucking Syndicate. Take a good look,” Tetsuya whispered. “Is this who you’re proud of being?”

Tetsuya’s touch had temporarily expanded Masato’s mind, giving him the capacity to absorb and process wide swaths of information in a fraction of a second, similar to the trick Tetsuya had used on himself earlier. Here, however, Tetsuya was in control of what Masato saw. He called up images and memories, taking advantage of the dilation of Masato’s mind to show him years of carnage and destruction - his father’s portfolio, and his own. How could anyone live with that much bloodshed? How could you kill, and destroy, and hurt so much, and still judge your own way of life normal? How could you live with yourself?

You couldn’t.

Masato had built a paradigm for himself over the course of his life, allowing him to see things from a perspective that justified his actions in terms of duty, of necessity, of orders and obedience. Tetsuya took that from him, and let him see the unmitigated horror of everything he’d been so proud of in his father and himself. Lives ruined, homes destroyed. Loved ones murdered or maimed.

Kris, dead.

Masato began to moan, and then to scream.

This moment was years in the making. When he’d been sent to watch over Kris, the first thing that had struck him about her was her pain. Her loss. He’d helped her with some of it eventually, but it had cost her so much to share that side of herself with him. All he could do was take that pain into himself, like drawing poison from a wound.

Now he was here to inflict that pain on those who’d dealt it to begin with. No, Masato wasn’t the one he really wanted to punish. That distinction was reserved for his father, but the man was already on death’s door. Tetsuya had no intention of putting him out of his misery by granting him an early death. Which wasn’t to say that his covert visits to the man’s private ward hadn’t paid great dividends. Without the memories he'd pulled from the man's fevered mind, he'd never have discovered the truth behind Leon Rosenfield’s death, or the significance Leon and Kris had had to Masato. He'd never have known who to go after next. Sometimes children paid for the sins of their parents. Kris certainly had. The way Tetsuya saw it, if Masato wanted to live up to his father's name so badly, he should begin by familiarising himself with the man's greatest accomplishments. And if he happened to realise just what scum he and his precious Syndicate really were along the way, well, it was too late to turn back now, wasn't it?

Kris believed in justice, in making the world as fair as it could possibly be, and it cut Tetsuya to the bone every time she stood up for that belief when the world had never been fair to her from the start. He knew better. Sometimes the world was only fair when you forced it to be. Now was one of those times. This was his chance to right the wrongs she’d suffered. To give her the justice she’d been denied as a child.

He redoubled his efforts, bringing Masato closer to oblivion. Breaking a mind was never easy. Familiarity with the subject accelerated the process, but it also made it harder to separate yourself from the person you were killing. Tetsuya was deep inside Masato’s guard, soaking in the same self-loathing, betrayal, and guilt that the man himself was experiencing. He held himself apart from it whilst simultaneously attempting to drown Masato in it. People could die like that, sometimes - the heart was a stubborn muscle, but the mind could override it, if you knew how to make it. If you could convince someone to embrace death wholeheartedly.

Tetsuya thought he could.

Let go, you fucker. There’s nothing left for you here. Your family is a nest of rats, your precious duty is a sham, and your bride is a disgusting leech.

Red mist rippled and churned in his mind. Tetsuya sensed indignation and fierce protective instinct fractionally before a flurry of white lace crashed into him, limbs flailing and fangs bared. Ah. The disgusting leech. Sakuya, the sacrificial pawn the Syndicate deemed disposable enough to be used in this farce of a marriage. Before, she had been nobody - just a pretty girl unfortunate enough to fall into debt with the wrong crowd. Now, she was worse than nothing.

She lowered her arms, shaking. Her pale skin was blistered where she’d covered her face as she’d dashed through the silvered smoke, but not charred, as a more senior specimen’s would have been. She was still within her first decade as a vampire, and the last traces of her humanity had yet to fade.

“Stay away from him!” She stood over Masato’s comatose form, arms outstretched in a childlike gesture of protection. “I don’t care who you are - you’re not going to hurt him any more!”

Tetsuya’s only response was a soft, almost inaudible utterance. She cocked her head, as if trying to catch what he’d said, but he saved her the trouble. His fist lashed out, catching her in the jaw and sending her stumbling backwards over Masato. At Tetsuya’s command, the spells engraved into the bands of mithril encircling his upper and lower arms, calves, and thighs flared to life, sheathing his body in a thin but impermeable barrier of force. The bracers were kludgy prototypes, the product of unsupervised tinkering that exploited the principles behind the conversion of mana to kinetic energy in ways that Sensei Ryou would never have approved of in his workshop. Interlocking kinetic barriers would stop incoming blows and bullets, but he had to be very careful not to let them get out of alignment or the forces at work would rip him apart. It was even possible to take advantage of the forcefield’s impermeable nature to punch straight through concrete with a bare fist, though if he didn’t calculate the appropriate vector inputs properly, there was a significant risk of tearing his own arm off. All in all, it was unsafe, reckless and probably suicidal.

It was worth it to punch a vampire in the face.

Not that it was particularly effective, though. Already she was getting up, her face barely even marked by his blow, which would have taken a man’s head off his shoulders. She glared at him, her jaw set resolutely, and lunged, but he threw himself sideways, skimming across the carpeted floor on a cushion of force. He needed his gun - punching a vampire might be satisfying, but it wasn’t going to get the job done in a fight like this.

His momentum carried him towards the gun, but before he could grab it she was on him, clawing wildly at his throat. The kinetic barrier held, repelling her - he could sense her confusion as her swipes refused to connect, turned aside by an invisible force. He groped desperately at the ground, trying to get a hold of his gun before she figured out what to do next. He felt his fingers brush the revolver’s grip - but it skittered out of his grip, pushed by the forcefield around them. Damn it. Pulling himself forward arm over arm, he mentally disengaged the spell powering his right bracer. This time, he managed to get his fingers around the grip and trigger. He cocked the hammer as he hauled himself back to his feet, stopping short as he realised that she wasn’t attacking him any more. Instead, she was hunched over Masato, her hands gently running over his stricken face, whispering to him as though calming a fevered child. Something in that image gave Tetsuya pause. There was too much humanity in that touch, too much love for him to think of her as just another vampire rather than a person.

But he remembered a young girl crying at a wake. He remembered the impotent anguish of the man he'd admired his whole life as he regarded the wasted, withered flesh of his arm. And he admitted to himself that it wasn't really about justice. It was about doing something. It was about striking back against the ones who'd hurt the people he cared about, striking at them wherever he could reach. Even if it meant destroying something as beautiful as this. Even if it meant punishing those who didn't really deserve it. If there was any way to hurt them back, any way to make them pay for the suffering they'd wrought, he'd take it.

He took the shot as she brought her lips to Masato’s.

-

“Masato? Masato, get up, please!” Cool hands on his face, slender arms holding him in an embrace. Masato felt something spark somewhere in the recesses of his consciousness, a sense that he should recognise that voice, that touch. So familiar. And yet he couldn’t place it, couldn’t put a face or a name to her voice. Her? She… was someone important. There had been a girl he’d cared about deeply, but she was gone. Dead. He’d killed her.

“No, Masato! It wasn’t real! You didn’t kill her. Nobody killed her, Masato. I… I was jealous, after the last time you mentioned her, so I looked her up. I didn’t do anything to her, just… watched her for a while. She’s still alive and doing fine. So… stop blaming yourself for something you didn’t do, alright?” She could hear his thoughts, somehow. Good. It was good that someone could make sense of his thoughts, even when he himself couldn’t. That girl… she was alive. Living her life, somewhere. That was good, too. But what about all the people he had killed? Those, he remembered clearly. The look in someone’s eyes when the light behind them went out forever. The screams of those who were dead but didn’t know it yet. Surely he deserved to be blamed for those. Surely someone with this much blood on their hands didn’t deserve to live, or to be happy, or to love.

“To hell with deserving! It’s not about what you deserve, Masato. It’s about what you get! I was a mess, and I fucked up a lot, back when I was alive. But I didn’t deserve to die like this.” Her voice choked slightly, and he could see her gesture vaguely at herself. “But you know what? I didn’t deserve you, either. Yet here we are. I’ve got you, and I won’t let go. Come back to me, please!”

Masato. She kept calling him that, as if she could use a name to pull his shattered self together and give it form. Each time she said it, he felt something pass between them.

“Who… am I?” he croaked, struggling to make his mouth and throat remember how to move. As he did, his eyes came back into focus, letting him get a clear look at her face. Beautiful. Things began to make sense again, aspects of himself that had been scattered to the wind settling back into place.

“You’re Ikeda Masato.”

Masato felt recognition and affirmation return to him.

“My husband.”

Sakuya. He reached up to touch her face.

“My love.”

She bent close, and he tasted her. Her lips. Her blood. Strength, life, and purpose flooded into him, along with a newfound clarity. The blood on his hands was not a mark of guilt. It was a sign of accomplishment. Every kill a step forward, a step towards what he had become today. He would not be ashamed of what he was, or of the things he’d had to do to come this far. He owned the murder, the ruin, the pain. Sakuya saw his eyes harden with resolve, and smiled, whispering through bloodstained lips.

“My killer.”