Author's note: Um... yeah. Don't ask where this came from. I was working on an AU Nagi/Omi fic and this popped into my head and wouldn't go away. PLEASE don't ask me for a sequel where they get together, it ain't gonna happen.

Warnings: shounen ai, spoilers for episode 4 (Kase), Asuka and Neu & Youji's last fight.

Someone Who Understands

I heard the soft click of the stairwell door behind me as someone padded out onto the roof to join me in my misery. Briefly I spared a thought to wonder which of them it might be: Omi, come out to cajole and plead with me to come 'back inside where it's warm'? Ken, with his awkward reassurances, ready to blurt out something tacky and tactless? Aya perhaps, here to glare me into submission so I would come back inside like the good little dog I was. Used to be.

I didn't care, frankly. They could all go to hell, and take Kritiker with them. I'd had enough, damn it. I'd been their bitch for two years, coming and going at their beck and call, doing all their damn dirty work for them. All because they'd offered me the chance to get back at the bastards who'd taken Asuka's life.

Well, now I was the bastard who'd taken Asuka's life. Neu might not remember me, might not remember being Murase Asuka, but that didn't make my guilt any less. Nothing would convince me that they weren't the same person. They looked alike, they moved the same way, they even smelled the same, damn it! And I could never forget the sweet honey of her voice, sliding over me like a silken whisper. Neu was Asuka, and I had killed her. Wrapped her tight in my garrotte, lifted her up over my back and pulled until I felt her life drain from her with her last choked words.

"Masafumi... ai shiteru." Her dying breath used to gasp out words of love to another man; a sick, twisted man who had used her and changed her past all recognition. Killed by the man who had loved her beyond life, who had dedicated his life to the darkness in order to punish her tormentors.

Now I was her tormentor, and I deserved no less than the punishments I'd meted out to my predecessors. Briefly I contemplated just hurling myself over the edge of the rooftop, ending my life so that my spirit could make its way to be tortured in Hell. I dismissed the impulse almost before it hit me; living with my sins was a far more appropriate punishment. Besides, the damn building was only three stories high. I was far more likely to just break something nasty than to kill myself.

The feel of another body plopping itself down to sit beside me startled me. I'd gotten so wrapped up in my contemplation that I'd actually forgotten that one of the others had come out. Oddly, whoever it was hadn't said a word. That wasn't unusual for Aya, but I couldn't imagine him just sitting beside me quietly like that. My curiosity was piqued despite myself; I looked over to see who it was.

Silvery moonlight glinted off dark chocolate hair, tracing the strong features of the boy who had tilted his head back to see the stars. Ken, then. I waited for him to blurt out whatever it was that he'd come to say, but he just sat there, legs slung over the side as mine were, leaning back on his arms and staring silently at the sky.

Silence and stillness weren't his style. He was always in motion, his mouth moving faster than his brain more often than not. It got on my nerves, this waiting, anticipating what he was going to say. In the end I spoke first, unable to stand it any longer. "What the hell do you want?" I snapped at him, voice hoarse with all my unshed tears. Tears that would remain unshed - I had no right to seek the release of tears, the comfort they could bring. This pain would stay bottled up inside forever, where I could cherish it as I had cherished her.

He didn't look at me, eyes still tracing absent patterns in the stars. He remained silent for another long moment, until I wondered if perhaps I hadn't actually voiced the words at all. I was just about to repeat myself when he finally spoke.

"Omi's making himself sick, pacing back and forth and worrying about you," he said, not unkindly. Still he didn't turn to face me. "He won't rest, even though that poison's not all out of his system yet."

So it was to be a guilt trip, was it? Useless. All my guilt was already wrapped up in Asuka's - Neu's - death, I had none left over for my fellow Weiss. Normally the thought of worrying sweet, gentle Omi would have been enough to bring me out of my depression, at least a little. Tonight it only left a hollow place inside me, another tiny niche carved out to add to the ache in my chest. "I don't care," I rasped, almost growling at him.

He continued as though he hadn't even heard me. "Aya's just sitting there, glaring at the wall. You'd think he didn't care at all, until you look in his eyes. He's been crying since we got back, just a little. I don't think he even realizes it, or he would have gone where we couldn't see it."

Even the startling image of Aya crying over my pain wasn't enough to break my apathy. "And I suppose you're here to tell me that if I just hold tight, everything will be better with time?" I snarled at him in return, unable to bear the thought of the useless platitudes that were considered 'appropriate' for situations like this.

At last he turned to face me, and I bit back an exclamation at the look he gave me. His ever-changing eyes were green tonight, the same bitingly pure emerald they were when he killed. There was no hint of the smooth brown tones that filled them when he was sad and contemplative, or the blue-green hues that signified his happiness. Only biting jade, piercing in their intensity. "No," was all he said. Just the one word, but the force behind it succeeded where all else had failed in reaching me.

"No?" I repeated, a little surprised. Ken, like Omi, was the type of person who always had a gentle word ready to soothe a wounded heart. It's why he was so damn good with his kids, why the customers loved him so much.

"No," he said again, the word accompanied by a brief shrug of his shoulders. "There's nothing I can say that will make it better. There's nothing anyone can do that will make the pain go away. Trying will only make it worse."

The numbing sorrow that consumed all else was sliding away, no matter how hard I tried to hold on to it. Anger was rising in its place; anger that this puppy of a boy thought he understood my pain, presumed to be believe that he could share it with me. "What the hell do you know about it?" I ground out, furious.

He turned his face back out to the cityscape, the moonlight casting half his features in sharp relief while plunging the other half into impenetrable shadows. It made it hard to read his expression, if the look on his face could be called an expression. It was a tight, pinched, blank look, like it wanted to be pained but was holding back by sheer force of will.

"We're killers," he replied, seemingly a non sequitur. "Two years ago that bothered me a lot, but I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. And I wanted revenge on the bastards that destroyed my life - wanted it bad." He paused for a moment, and despite my anger I found the harsh words I wanted to say throttled in my throat by something I saw in that non-expression. "Nowadays it doesn't really bug me anymore. Sometimes THAT bothers me, that I'm not upset by it anymore, but most of the time I just kill them and get on with my life."

Another long pause, though I sensed he wasn't finished. This seriousness, this... eloquence... was so utterly unlike Ken that I found myself fascinated by it, wondering what else was hidden beneath his happy-go-lucky, sometimes goofy exterior. At last he drew a deep breath, and continued.

"But sometimes... sometimes you can't just walk away. Sometimes it's not a stranger at the other end of your weapon. Sometimes it's someone that you cared about, someone you once held in your arms, whispered to in the middle of the night, told all your deepest, darkest secrets and fantasies to. Someone you thought would always be there for you, no matter what. Someone you thought would die to protect you. Someone... who would never betray you, just like you'd never betray them."

The steadiness of his voice was deteriorating, falling into a harsh whisper that was choked with emotion. Now I could see the brown creeping into his gaze, muddying that clear, pure emerald into something more confused. "And even when they do betray you, even when they turn on you and try to kill you, even when they tell you how much they hate you, how much you disgust them... you still love them," he concluded, voice now so soft that I unconsciously leaned forward to hear him. "When you turn on them in turn, when you betray your belief in them and take their life from them, so that they'll never hurt anyone else ever again, it haunts you. It haunts you all through your waking hours, all through your dreams and nightmares, till the end of your days. And though it might dull a little with time the pain will always be there, hovering just on the edge of any happiness that you might someday find, tainting it."

His rough voice wound around me with a strength I wouldn't have believed possible if I hadn't felt it myself, his words striking a chord so deep inside me that my whole body reverberated with it. And I knew... he understood. Of all the billions of people in this whole miserable world, somehow he was the one who understood.

There was only one person I could think of whom he could be talking about. "Kase?" I asked, not quite certain. His words had implied that he was speaking not just of someone that he'd cared for but someone he'd loved, in the deepest sense that you could love another person; I hadn't thought he was inclined that way.

He nodded, confirming my suspicion. "Yeah. I'm bi, though I don't advertise it. Force of habit, I guess... we'd have been kicked out of J-League if anyone had ever found out." That made sense; the J-League players, like J-rock pop idols, were people that kids all over Japan looked up to for guidance. Role models. The J-League commission wouldn't have been pleased to discover that their top player was sleeping with one of his teammates. I could almost believe that it would have caused even more of a fuss than Ken's supposed 'cheating' on his game.

Thinking back over that mission so long ago, when Ken had confronted his best friend and discovered the hatred that Kase had secretly been harbouring for him for years, I couldn't believe I'd missed the signs. Ken's upset had really been just a bit too overwhelming for the destruction of a friendship, even one that had lasted as long and been as close as his and Kase's.

If that was true, then he really did understand. Like me, he had loved and lost someone precious to him, only to have them return... as an enemy. An enemy that he had killed with his own hands, whose dying words had been an utterance of hatred for the one who loved him. "It doesn't ever get any better?" I asked him, hating myself for sounding forlorn and wistful.

He shrugged. His eyes were almost entirely brown now, that soft doe-like look that made him seem so impossibly sorrowful. "It doesn't get better, but it does get easier," he replied simply. "It stops being quite so hard to smile, stops hurting so much to try to be cheerful. After a while you find yourself forgetting for minutes at a time, then hours. Even days. But I don't think you can ever let go of them entirely; they're too much a part of you."

He glanced at me again, then looked away just as quickly, the gesture almost shy. "It helps, a little, to not be alone."

Instantly my suspicious nature came to the front. Stereotypes to the contrary I was decidedly not interested in men, and doubly not interested in screwing up our precarious team dynamics by sleeping with a member of Weiss. "Ken, I'm not..."

"That wasn't a come on!" he interrupted me hastily, eyes wide and blushing as he apparently realized how his words could be taken. "Honestly. I like you, Youji, and I won't deny that you're attractive as all hell, but I wouldn't sleep with you if you asked me to. It would... it would just be way too complicated. And if - or maybe I should say when - we broke up..." he trailed off and shrugged. He knew as well as I did that a messy break-up would likely mean the end of Weiss. Even a civil break-up would bring tension to the team that we didn't need.

"I just meant that if you need a shoulder to cry on, someone to listen that understands, I'm here," he continued in a husky voice. "I know how it feels to carry all that guilt on your shoulders, and I know why you do it. I won't try to convince you to give it up, or let go of her. I'll just be there for you, as a friend."

The tears welled up in my eyes, and before I knew what was happening they were spilling over my cheeks. I still felt that I didn't deserve to shed them, but I couldn't stop myself as he wrapped an arm around my shoulder and drew my head down to rest on his chest. I sobbed into his shirt, just letting the overwhelming horror of the night's events overtake me as I cried for the woman I loved more than life, the woman I had killed as she called out to another.

And above me I could hear his own quiet sobs, feel the tears striking the top of my head as he cried for me, cried with me, cried for himself and Kase and the guilty pain we both shared. And even though the guilt and pain didn't abate, didn't lift in the least, I found that he had been right after all; it did help, to have someone who understood.

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