When they found her, she was already dead. The body's wounds had laid open for hours, the blood caked in hideous, thick layers; a limp weed in the arms of the night guard who, after circling the area for a few minutes, abandoned his bike and found her. When he picked her body to place her in the stretcher, her head sagged so and hung backwards, as if her neck were pure Jell-O.

He seemed an ordinary young man, about 18 years old, when he entered into the shop, the kind that linger by windows for quite some time and stare at merchandise for hours. His hands were in his pocket, shades covered his eyes, and there was a bounce to his steps as if he were on his own private video. The kind who live in their heads. He stood by the back room's displays, looking at some statues of glass, but never touching a single one of them. They were animals, tiny circus treats crafted from coloured glass.

"Anything we can help you with?"

His long, thin arms made a gesture as if the words were the ones that moved them, but he hadn't been listening. The auburn yellow of his hair caught itself reflected in the mirrors by the display, and this seemed to draw his attention away from the glass. For a moment, the store clerk that spoke to him thought the young man couldn't hear him, but just then, he walked away from the glass and made his way outside. The clerk watched him exit and followed his strides down the street as far as he could see him. The kind that never buy anything.
 
 
 

It was past midnight. The young girt sat sprawled on the mat with her legs up to the ceiling, swinging them sideways and bumping ever so slightly on his bed. It annoyed him every once on a while, but most of the time he was glad she was there. There was a calming presence to her swinging and to the haunting eyes that stared at him whenever she looked at him, and to her feathery laughter.

"Niichan?" she said, bumping harder into the mattress so he'd stop reading and give her attention. "You have to read it aloud so I can hear!”

"Sorry," he said. The story and the illustrations didn't want him to go on, he thought. They wanted him to keep them for himself alone. "Where was 1?"

"The king of mirrors was just about to kiss the flute player..." She sighed and sprang from the mat, arms and legs a mess of childish humour. "You stopped at the most important part! " She tried to tickle him and take the book away from him, but he swung his legs from under himself and was soon skittering over the mattress and the miles of pillows, holding the book high above his head.

"Mou! Niisan! " She hopped up and down, trying to grab the book, but he leap higher, the waves of his auburn hair becoming a shower over her face. He laughed as she tried to catch him one more time and rolled into the crevice that separated their beds. The mattresses came apart, her leg getting caught, but this didn't stop her. For a moment, he thought she would be hurt and slowed his hopping.

“Imouto... ?"

Still, she didn't even slow down from her pursue and was soon bouncing as high as he had been, reaching with tiny fingers.

"There!" She yelled as she finally caught the book. He giggled and dropped the book, the young girl and all. "Oi!"

"Serves ya right for being such a pest," he said. She rubbed her button, wincing slightly.

"You're a bad story reader," she said. "You skipped the intro chapter, skipped the part when Yoshi received the pretty panther, and stopped just when he was about to be kissed." She stuck his tongue at him, and sat down, opening the book on her lap. At once, the vivid water-colour pictures and the fantasy tale seemed to swallow her. He could only watch, sitting down on the bed
again, and hope she would continue to read so he could hear too.
 
 
 
 

She was fifteen years old when I saw her last. It was the Winter time which drew us together most of the time, the home where she lived allowing her to visit the family. Mom and Dad seldom even spoke to each other on the rest of the year, but we didn't need their consent. We had a world of our own and every Winter, that world would return to us. Or us to them. She built half that world on her own; I had little to do with it.

How many years apart were we? Two, but it seemed to me she was a child still, no matter how long her legs got or how her body changed. When she wore floral dresses and butterflies in her hair, I knew she was still a child, no matter how many school boys followed her with their blazing gaze. She skipped left and right with her school satchel, her hair fashioned in braids that hung over her shoulders. It bounced too. Everything about her bounced, as if she were a live wire instead of a young girl.

Behind the tree, she said one winter, is where the fairy people live. Wicked oni want to steal their souls and eat them. She swore the shadows along the walls were a kingdom in which a childlike empress commanded creatures. The king of dreams, she said that same Winter, owns a raven that was once a poet and has eyes that sparkle like stars. I listened to her as we walked down the frosted road, the flowers asleep under the snow and ice. I never said anything.

"Do you know what I want?" she said when we stopped by the frozen pond. The low voices of other people floated unrecognizable towards us. Her face was still small then, her eyes large and dark as she stared up at the low hanging branches of the trees above us. "A glass menagerie. Like that story Hidoshi sensei made us read last Wednesday. The girl owned a glass menagerie with all kinds of animals." I didn't know the story, but she acted as if I knew what she meant and illustrated with her fingers how the horses looked like, or what the elephant resembled.

The voices of the people grew louder then, a few skaters choosing to dance on the icy water a few feet from us. She cast them a -dreamy look, watching their slim bodies become one and then two and hearing the ice whine under the skate blades. They spun too fast for my liking, and in the ice, their reflections looked like ice, as if their figures were glass. She didn't say anything else that night. I never said anything.
 
 
 

The strands of his red hair strayed over his face. His breathing come in slower, lips barely moving. The young man standing before him seemed ethereal, as if he weren't there at all. But, he could hear him.

"What would you have done?" he asked. His figure wavered into three different shades of lights, the pieces of his auburn hair shifting in and out of his eyes. His mouth was set, his hands still inside the pocket of his pants. His figure seemed too tall, too thin.

Flashes of red. Strands of loose, wild hair on his face. The young man touched him, a slight brush of the strands of the red hair that fell across his face. He was real.
 
 
 

In his dream, it was autumn and they were making love. A tangled tree of arms and legs and clean smelling flesh swerving into each other. He wasn't just a butterfly pinned to the mattress, and he wasn't an abusive assassin. His auburn hair mingled with the other's red hair just as their sighs tickled their necks. When they were done, they would always sit by the window and watch the slow Tokyo traffic in the streets bellow. There were always people shopping or carrying grocery bags in the cement sidewalks, and always a biker speeding out from the cracks between the buildings. ne red head would lean his head on his lap and close his eyes, and he would reach down and brush his cheek with his fingers.

He could get into people's minds.
 
 
 

My sister never comprehended why first year counsellors warned young girls to stay away from the eastern part of the university. It was dark there, the parking lot separated from the rest of the campus by a sidewalk embedded in trees and heavy foliage. Students seldom hanged around after dark and when they did, they rushed in pairs as if dogs were chasing them. The parking complex made sounds. They were like moanings of distant people, or ghosts that, lingered on the cement columns.
The lights of the ceiling flickered on and off as the cars parked on higher levels made their way down. She must've heard when he came upon her. He wasn't that tall, and he was wearing black leather, the type that makes noise no matter how slick one moves. She didn't see though, too busy thinking about the lecture Dr. Tsushima had given on the British poem Beowulf and composing a draft of her report on it. Perhaps, she could relate the poem to the contemporary Japanese poet Yotaro, whom she liked.

"Need a ride?" he must've said.

No. She had a car. But, she didn't turn around, not really knowing where the voice came from. He landed on her, smashing he] against the back door of her car. She screamed, her bags and books sprawling on to the ground. His hands covered her face, twisting her flesh back in their savagery, and she pinned her arms behind her. She was weak and the pressure almost choked her, but he didn't allow her to faint or grow languid in his arms. With each thrust, he slammed her head into the window of the back seat. The pages of her book moved on their own, back and towards, as if an invisible hand were leafing the book in search of the perfect lines to read. King Lear murdering his daughter. Kubla Kahn tormented by the grey apparition. T.S. Eliot drowning in the Wasteland.

She died in that parking lot by her car.
 
 
 

Aya rose, drawing his head up from his lap. There was a peculiar rhythm to his walk, to the way he disappeared into the area of the room where the kitchen stove stood against the wall next to the simple shelf with food and drinks, and the refrigerator. He could hear the red head choosing one of Nekko no Jugito, two. The red head's footsteps kissed the rugs deliberately slow.

"What happened to him?" His voice penetrated the thickness of his awareness.

Schuldig didn't answer. He felt the edge of the window sill cold against his forehead, where it rested against the pane. An old woman had exited the Chinese Deli directly across from their building, a white bag inside filled with fruits. Schuldig followed her patient steps as she made her way up the street amidst the sea of people, all of them engrossed in their own worlds. Aya's lithe body remained rigid,, not really expecting any answer, every now and then taking a sip from his Jugito.
 
 
 

"What the fuck does one do to kill a bastard?"

Schuldig moved the cigarette in his mouth across his lips, gnawing on its butt. The smoke circulated over his dark shades and drifted into his nose. The screen before him flashed tiny letters, codes and codes and codes. To him, they were just codes that must've led to other codes. He needed a dictionary to understand them, he supposed. he found that funny, a dictionary for murder codes.

"Patience," a voice came from behind him. "It's there." The smoke about his face cleared, revealing the dim lit room about him. It was a basement sort of place, the walls a crude grey with traces of rust, a set of low pipes travelling from west to east, and a few seats missing one leg or the other. The man that spoke stood a complete difference from their surroundings, a pastel suit and sleek hair. Crawford didn't wear shades, but Schuldig could never truly see his eyes. -

"Where in all this crap?" Schuldig hit a few buttons and the screen duplicated, branching of into numbers and series of map like numbers. "Why can't you find it for me, eh?" His words were more like spits than language, and the smell from his cigarette buffeted his face.

Behind him, Crawford did not react. "Takatori sama wants you to be the one to do it," he said.

"Tell him to send me a dictionary down here!" He closed a few windows and popped some new ones, this time the colours merely blue. With each click, the keys received a harder strike. Soon, it was as if he were banging on the keyboard. Crawford watched veins appear on his arms and wrists. "Fucking joke," Schuldig mumbled inaudibly.

The lights flickered slightly as Crawford drew closer, closing his eyes. Without a change to his stride or his visage, he produced a single, thin needle from his suit. He felt Schuldig’s back arch as it penetrated his shoulder.
 
 
 

On Tuesday morning, he woke up to find Aya had gone. He rolled into the warm place where the red head usually slept and buried his face in his pillow. Aya had taken the smell of his hair as well.

Every night they spent together down at the basement, Crawford sat on a couch that someone had mysteriously brought down into the room. He wouldn't move, not really, but it seemed to Schuldig that the British man would shift to the left every second or so, until the man had crawled across the cushions all the way to the left armrest. Even so, every time Schuldig would turn to check if he had moved, Crawford remained in the centre of the couch. It was the nature of their relationship.

Months took the time toasts before they pop out hot for him to arrange the data his new boss granted him. Digital maps, processing units, databases and illegal connections into documents and CUM files. Half of the files he opened or closed seemed alien to him, the technology escaping him like some course in Logic. It was a favour, Takatori kept reminding him, to grant him his service. When he found him, the older man said, Schuldig was a mess, and might have been dying in his own piss; had it not been for him, he might have died. The apartment where he had been living seemed more like a bomb shelter in some dark city amidst a war, and his refrigerator had been empty for months. No. There had been things in there. Empty cans.

At 2:00 AM, Schuldig found him. Crawford's thin lips stretched from the corners of his eyes to his nose, and Schuldig knew he had pleased the man.
 
 
 

Twice, we left a note. I could imagine him. Arriving at his quiet home with two TVs and CD player stereo with amps stretching from wall to wall, and finding the note in his mail box. It was anonymous, but he'd be interested, locked in the seduction he must've felt crawling up his legs as he ripped open the ordinary envelope. We made love to him, Crawford and I, through those letters. He'd sit for hours and gaze at the tiny letters, the slight handwriting and wonder who it was that wrote those messages. We'd watch sometimes as he savoured his own lips and twisted like a lizard over the walls of his house and ended up coming into his bed sheets.

"We don't we just go in and kill him already?" I asked one night when Crawford and I finished writing one of the letters. The Briton looked at me as if I wasn't even there. "We're playing with him," he responded and licked the envelope closed. It seemed so simple when he said it, that in the dim light of the basement, I could picture the words arranged in perfect order forming patterns along the wall. Crawford could fake my sister's handwriting as good as I could.
 
 
 

It drove him crazy, the games. Entire nights and days, he'd sit in the computer, searching for names and streets and bars. He followed the man as he went to his job and ate with his friends. He was a business man, Schuldig discovered, one of those short brief carrying busy looking men who spend days at hot springs and eat lunch with geisha. Think like him, Takatori had said, until you become him. It became an obsession, becoming the killer. Pumped in adrenaline, he'd watch TV with him, shop in the deli, cross downtown and make love to his concubines. He'd spend the droll days with him, the boring Sundays and sleepy Mondays. All the while, Crawford watching him as he drew closer to the computer's screen, barking at the files and databases. There was a collection of needle bites along his arms and legs, a flower bed of cigarette butts all over the floor. Pieces of liquor bottles in the corners of the room. Glass, glass everywhere, smelling of liquor and nightmare spit. Broken glass, bottles flung in blind rage, forming grotesque images in the places where they landed. Nothing like elephants and horses and monkeys.

Some nights, Crawford would touch him. But, the madness would never leave his head.
 
 
 

"Aya…?"

The red head didn't move, head low over his knees, eyes half closed.

"When I found him, he didn't scream or cry." Schuldig's head stopped as it reached the cold pane of the window. It was open, the night air zipping under the crystalline rainbows drawn by the light posts outside. "He didn't say anything. He just died."

He was barking now, but Aya wasn't moving. Fists at his sides as heavy as boulders, he wheeled onto the red head. He was screaming at the ceiling, at the invisible furniture the room lacked, at the stove and refrigerator. At the Nekko no Jugito cans by Aya's feet. His voice growing louder and louder, until it seemed to be ripping his throat.
"Didn't say anything! He just died, Aya! He just died!"
 
 
 

"Aya… He just died… Aya… He just died… and my sister didn't come back."

The pillow was loosing Aya's heat, no matter how hard he tried to press the sheets into his face. Tears mingled with blood from his nose, and sweat. The heat escaping him…
 
 
 

Schuldig stopped screaming. Aya’s palm on his shoulder. Violet eyes, red hair. Orange hair, lips filled with spit. Silent. No smile in Aya's face.
 
 
 

Schuldig closed his eyes, the pillow covering his mouth.

Aya reached down to touch his face. And brush his hair.
 
 
 

This story is for Aya, my friend, even if he is stuck in an endless loop of sadness due to thesis nightmares and life in general. Even if he's so sour, like the real Aya or worse, I still love him. As is known popularly by the rest of the team, this story was written after watching the mega-cool video for "Tokyo Sling" where Aya and Schuldig share a moment by a window. Thank you for reading, my friends.

All comments should be left by Crawford's Computer Desk, and, if the clutter doesn't swallow 'em, they will be answered as soon as possible.
 
 
 
 

© January 20, 2000 Team Bonet. Weiß Kreuz is © 1997 Project Weiß and Koyasu Takehito. Thank you for reading.