Archive of Our Own

This close to the city, there’s not a star in the sky, the air made up and filled with every kind of pollutant imaginable.  That combined with the river means it smells something awful; Nene thinks she would probably be gagging even if she weren’t currently hefting a body behind her.

Yashiro Nene is a normal young woman by all accounts — a little dreamy, maybe, with a fantastic talent for getting herself into trouble, but normal.  All her life, she’s been normal; even earlier today, she’d been normal.  She’d been completely normal all the way up to and including this evening, when a pushy coworker had pushed her a little too far in the office late at night, made a few too many comments, insisted a little too hard on walking her to her car, on getting her number, on touching her hair when he spoke.

Really, she hadn’t meant to kill him.

With an exasperated huff, Nene drops the man’s leg and wipes sweat from her forehead.  She must be a sight for sore eyes: bangs clinging sticky to her skin, mud climbing up her stockings, and blood all over her favorite blouse.  She’d panicked at first, of course, shoved the body into her car and cried until mascara dripped down her cheeks — but Nene is no quitter.  At some point her hot-blooded rabbit heart started beating in overtime, and she’d decided she’d needed a plan.

Now, sore and exhausted and covered in mosquito bites as she is, she’s beginning to think her plan may not have been a good one.  Sighing, she reaches down to grab her dead coworker’s trouser leg again — and freezes.

There past the bushes, a cigarette in his hand and a body at his feet, is a man.  He’s young: maybe early or mid-twenties, a few years younger than Nene, with a sharp, boyish face and a shock of black hair.  Draped in brambles and nighttime, he’s like an old painting or low-quality photograph, vivid and indiscernible all at once, smudged out into nothing in the corners.

And he’s looking at her.

Bright amber-chip eyes slice and scrape their way up her body, from her heels stuck in the mud to her ripped stockings to her cold hands wrapped tight around a corpse’s ankle.  The cold assessment there fades hard and fast into amused shock, and by the time his gaze slides to hers, he’s grinning.

His teeth glint shiny and sharp as he pulls his cigarette away from his mouth, smoke floating through the air in a long, measured exhale.  “Need a little help?”

So begins the cooperation and mutual understanding of Nene and Amane.  And she only knows him as Amane, too; though she’d stumbled out her full name when prompted, frantic and rushed as she’d watched Amane shovel his weight in dirt out of a shallow grave, he hadn’t been inclined to do the same.

“Amane,” she tests uncertainly, watching him pack his nondescript landscaping gloves he’d worn all night into a nondescript toolkit; and he smiles, as wild and bloodstained as a fairytale monster.  “Atta girl.”

They can see her car from here, though she can’t see his; like with everything else, she can’t help but feel like he’s gleaning more from this interaction than she is.  Leaning casually against the hood of her little sedan, he walks her through some sort of crash course in how not to get caught in an almost jovial voice, like he’s done this a million times before.

There’s a part of her, of course, that is spiraling with the knowledge that she has almost certainly just stumbled into a serial killer.  There was a reason Nene had thought to bring a body here: it’s about as remote as it gets for leagues around.  Apparently, she thinks queasily, remembering the corpse at his feet, tossed into the same hole he’d tossed Nene’s coworker into, Amane had the same idea.

Still, ridiculous as it sounds, she’s too tired and too burned out to freak out over it yet, all her regret and anxiety and moral crises already cried out on her steering wheel.  She’s exhausted, almost dead on her feet, uncomfortably sticky with blood and humidity, panic buzzing distant in the back of her mind like a building migraine — and maybe she’ll have more of a reaction to meeting a serial killer face to face in the shower or falling asleep or for the rest of her life, but she just doesn’t have the brain space right now.  Killing a man really takes it out of you, as it turns out.

Plus — and this might be even more ridiculous — Nene doesn’t think he’s going to hurt her.  Amane has let a lot of expressions peek in between his cheerful facade tonight: surprised, puzzled, entertained, maybe even fascinated.  There’s a glint there she doesn’t like, like the opportunistic eye of a scavenger.  But even so, even with the blood on his hands and the blood on hers, she wants to believe in him, even if there’s no reason to, even if it goes against every instinct she has.

“Thank you,” she mumbles quietly once his lecture slows to a stop.  Her eyes throb with tiredness and she rubs them jerkily; when she speaks, her voice is thick.  “I don’t know how to repay you for this.”

It is, in retrospect, one of the worst possible things she could say.

Amane grins, perfectly friendly and average were it not for the murder kit at his side and that scavenger’s glint in his eyes.  “You could start by giving me your email.”

Sleep comes fast and dreamless and easy, and waking feels like swimming through molasses.  Still, as Amane had directed (instructed, insisted), she over-gorges herself on caffeine and hauls herself into her normal routine, arriving to the office on time and absolutely flawless, last night’s events hidden behind a twisted updo and the smart cut of her outfit.  She chats with her coworkers like normal, does her work like normal, as cheerful and friendly as ever.

When she checks her work email, she sees an inquiry from a client.  When she clicks into it, her blood runs cold.

Amane is a very good liar.  There is nothing incriminating in the email, nothing worth checking over if she weren’t expecting it.  Other than the careful and complicated encryption, it’s just an everyday inquiry like all the others in her inbox; her thumb brushes up and over the note in her jacket pocket, hastily scrawled last night, the agreed-upon key to this little riddle.

Phone numbers are too conspicuous, Amane had told her last night; it’d be different if it was a stranger, but Nene had known her victim.  If she acted off at all, if they suspected her because they were the last two out the door — it was too large a risk.  Nene puzzles over what, exactly, that means as she makes her way after work to the little restaurant Amane had specified in the encrypted email.  She slides into a seat at the deserted counter, chats with the waitress as she orders, and waits.

When the bell at the top of the door jingles, Nene turns around conspicuously only to lock eyes with Amane.  He looks different than he had last night, she thinks: warmer, more normal, less harbinger of death and more boy-next-door.

“Hi there, stranger,” he says, all casual and easy as he slides into the seat next to her.  It’s not out of place here, in a little old café with dinged up tables and a single waitress working the floor.  It sends a shiver up Nene’s spine anyway.

“Hello,” she mumbles, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, fingers drumming hard enough to send ripples through her coffee.

Amane asks innocuous questions: how was her day?  Her night?  He even asks if she comes here often, with a wiggle of his eyebrows so ridiculous it manages to relax her somewhat.  Nene reports dutifully, slowly defrosting: work was fine, and her night was fine, too, until they’re talking like real people, like they hadn’t buried a body each last night.

“I wish we could talk more privately,” Amane says, leaned onto the counter with a playful grin on his face.  Nene is struck again by his willingness to show his face; she catches the waitress staring from across the room, and is struck also by the realization that they must look like they’re flirting.  Maybe they are.

“I could give you my information,” she rushes suddenly, wide-eyed and impulsive — and in an instant, Amane’s easy, friendly expression shifts into something pointed: cold assessment, amused surprise, a scavenger’s opportunistic glint.

On the back of her receipt, she scrawls her name, her phone number, her home address.  When she slides it across the table to Amane, he keeps his eyes fixed solely on her even as he runs his thumb across the paper, folds it carefully, and sets it in his jacket pocket.

“You know, Yashiro,” he says, and there’s no smile this time; he’s shock-serious, almost blank, head tilted sideways and slightly up in a way that strikes her as odd, imperious, unnatural, “you always manage to surprise me.”

He walks her to her car.  Sitting still as a statue, knuckles white on the wheel, she watches him fold himself into his car across the lot: a dark and unremarkable sedan.  He gives her a quick salute as he pulls into the road and is gone in a blink.  He’s a good driver, she finds herself thinking distantly as she muscle-memory’s her way home, like that matters at all, like that has any effect on the fact that she’d just told a murderer where she lived.

But then, she thinks as she lets herself in, she’s a murderer too, now.  Maybe that’s why she’s so calm: they’re the same.  She already knows the worst thing he’s ever done; he already knows hers.

If last night’s rest had been dark and shapeless, tonight’s is the opposite: she dreams bright and vivid and restless.  A dark abyss, the smell of smoke, fingers wrapped around her ankles, dragging her back — and a growing feeling, an ever-sinking pit in her stomach, a terrifying hunger she can’t even be certain belongs to her.

Still, the weeks pass by just fine.  Nene follows her routine but for the days she gets strange, coded emails; then, when she leaves the office, she meets with Amane.  He’s as strangely charismatic and hauntingly bizarre as ever, gives her bites of genuine advice in between smalltalk and meaningless flirtation.  Most of the time, in spite of his friendly words, he looks at her like she could be anyone, like he doesn’t care for her at all; but still, he keeps inviting her.  Nene isn’t certain she cares for him much, either — but still, she keeps coming when called like a well-trained dog.

Some uneasy friendship builds sudden and fierce amidst the alliance.  One night, sitting beside him on a grassy cliff overlooking the sea, Nene finally works up the nerve to ask the question that’s been plaguing her since they met.  “Why…  I mean.  Was your first kill an accident, too, like mine?”

Wind blusters past them, emboldened by its proximity to the sea.  Nene’s hair whips hard into her face and eyes, hard enough that she flinches away automatically, tearing up, tucking herself into the closest solid object.  That solid object’s arm wraps protectively around her shoulders, and before Nene can even flush with the realization that she’d cuddled up to Amane, he’s speaking.

“No,” he says, as serious as she’s ever seen him, eyes hard and jaw set as he gazes at something well beyond the horizon.  “No, it wasn’t an accident.”

He tells her a story about a pair of twins — brothers, confidantes, best friends.  About their adventures, how close they were, how strange and complicated and all-encompassing their relationship had been, like two moons sharing the same orbit, spinning round and round each other, unable to escape.

He tells her about a mother, a terrible sickness, a terrible mistake.  A boy mistaken for monster, held down and violently drowned for the sake of his soul in the bathtub, and his twin left suddenly alone, with no one to share in that knowledge with beside the mother, who wrung her blood-stained hands and cried to the police that he’d run away, he was gone, she’d only left him alone for a minute, how could this have happened?

“She took a fall down the stairs after that,” he tells the sea with a sardonic smile, detached but for the way his fingernails dig into the flesh of Nene’s shoulder.  “Died in a medically-induced coma not long after.  Happily ever after.”

The salt in the air does little to appease the nausea clawing at her gut.  “You…  Your own mother, you…”

His head doesn't turn, but his eyes slide sideways to catch hers, lit up glinting by the distant moon, and Nene is suddenly very, very aware of his arm around her, their proximity to the cliff’s edge, the fact that no one in the world knows where she is or who she’s with right now.  She’s a loose end, and an easy target.

But he only considers her another second before his tight grip falls lax and lets go.  “My own brother,” he says simply.

Nene breathes in, holds it, breathes out.  Below them, the ocean laps greedily at the cliffs, all but willing them to fall; Nene has always loved the sea, but here, tonight, the crash of the water into itself doesn't feel like anything other than violence.  A shiver passes through her, and she pulls her knees into herself, wrapping her arms around them, wiggling her toes into the coat she’d laid out to sit on.

“Do you regret it?” she asks, eyes trailing almost shyly from the ground and up the long line of his body, stark and distinct against the empty horizon.

He grins, easy and boyish, catching her breath in her throat like a hand around her neck.  “Do you really have to ask?”

A few days later, the authorities come to her workplace to ask the office some vague questions.  She gets sat down in the break room and tells an officer that yes, she was the last person out that night, and yes, her missing coworker had been the last out before her, and no, she doesn’t know where he could be or why he hadn’t been home.  She hadn’t heard anything strange, hadn’t noticed anything off about him; she hadn’t seen anything in the parking lot; in fact, she doesn’t even know where he’d parked.  They weren’t close, she explains with a demure smile; they’d hardly even spoken since he’d joined the team.

Missing persons cases rarely go anywhere without either a dedicated family member or a body; her coworker has neither.  Just as suddenly as the questions come, they go away.  He was an adult man with no real ties, they say, no commitments; maybe he just disappeared.

“Lucky,” Amane says, words almost swept away by the wind.  He’d sent her the address to a park earlier today, encrypted with the new code he’d tucked teasingly behind her ear.  Seated side by side at the base of the fountain, they almost look like a couple again.

Nene clutches her coat closer to herself, unable to blame it entirely on the chill in the air.  “I don’t know what’s so lucky about spending my lunch break being interrogated.”

Amane’s laugh is high and wicked, like the crackle of an overgrown fire.  “But you weren’t being interrogated; that’s the lucky part.  It’s unusual to kill someone you know and be able to get off as easily as you have so far.”

So far.  Nene shivers.  “Why are we here tonight, Amane?”

His eyes slide to hers, half-lidded and lazy.  “Why the suspicion?  Can’t we just be friends, partners in crime, spending a night together?”

She steadfastly ignores the entendre and stares up instead at the moon.  It’s dim tonight, a hazy approximation of a circle covered in clouds like batting over a light, too far to warm and too vague to be any comfort.

When she looks back, Amane has turned fully to face her.  “Hey Yashiro,” he says, and he’s smiling, but it isn't a nice smile.  “Are you afraid of me?”

Taken aback, Nene blinks.  “I don’t know,” she says, and she really doesn't; she doesn't know.  “Should I be?”

There is a feeling that she attributes to Amane and nobody else: a too-late sort of regret, like the moment when you realize the puddle was deeper than you thought it was, or the next step was just a little too far away.  It’s like there’s a gauge of interest in him that’s only ever going up; she sees it jump up now, a jerk of his eyebrows and a delighted twist of his mouth before he tilts ever nearer.  This close, she can smell the smoke on his breath, could almost kiss him if she had one ounce more courage and three less self-preservation.

Some switch flips.  Amane looks at her with that same detached consideration, less like a friend and more like a particularly engaging toy — but there’s something else, too, some flicker of something she doesn’t know how to classify.  It almost looks genuine; and then, as quick as it comes, it’s gone.

As if as an answer to her question, he says, “Actually, I wanted to have a little fun tonight.”  He slides open the messenger bag at his side to reveal a trash bag, a few lengths of rope, and other oddities.  “Are you in?”

Out of breath and incredulous, she whispers, “Are you really asking me this?”

Her heart thumps so loudly she’s certain Amane must be able to hear it, so loudly it hurts.  She’s never done anything this exciting, this spontaneous, this overwhelmingly dangerous before.

Even hours later, standing in her kitchen and scrubbing blood out of her pantyhose, the rhythmic pound of her heart hasn’t slowed; if anything, it’s only gotten deeper, stronger, like at any moment it’ll break all her ribs and set straight out of her body.  Watching the red slip into soft pinks as it spirals sudsy down the drain, Nene hardly feels like herself at all.

It’s exhilarating.  Nene has never considered herself anything but normal: she wakes up every day, puts on the same sets of blouses and skirts and heels, staples and sorts and sends the same papers and messages over and over.  Then she comes home, blows kisses to her hamster, goes to bed.  Rinse, wash, repeat.

Rinse, wash, repeat.  The pantyhose are stretched with the strain of overwash, ruined by her intention to remedy.  She holds them limp and damp in her hands as she pads back into her bedroom — and behind her, the bathroom door opens.

Amane is a monster dressed as a man and Nene should know that best out of anyone, has seen his face twisted grotesque and gleeful, blood painted across the bridge of his nose, a knife clutched as a lifeline in his hand.  She’s seen him play god, make promises he has no intention to keep, and whisper sweet nothings to a cooling corpse.  It’s different, she thinks, to see him, the rope, even the body, than to watch, to participate if as only as an impartial observer, pristine and above it all but for where hot blood splattered and sank into her tights below the knee.

Ever since they met, she hasn’t been able to rid the image from her mind of Amane taking a languid drag from his cigarette with no regard whatsoever for the corpse at his feet.

As if beckoned by her thoughts, Amane stops just behind her to meet her eye in the mirror.  His face and shoulders are flushed from the hot water, still-wet hair pushed in damp spikes away from his forehead, a sharp contrast from the hauntingly pale, desaturated version of him in her head.  “Thanks,” he says simply with his usual pointed grin, but Nene wonders if she’s imagining the bit of genuine feeling there, too, maybe even some embarrassment at being in her bedroom as his eyes rove curiously over her decor.  “Should I…  I’ll take the couch.”

Maybe he already knew where she lived, but it feels like a line has been crossed in letting him inside, in letting him sleep here, with her only a room away.  “Yeah,” she breathes, throwing the tights carelessly on top of her laundry basket, “yeah, okay.  I’ll get you a blanket before I get in the shower.”

She leaves him in the living room.  Standing naked in the bathroom while she waits for the water to warm up, she swears she hears a rustling in her room — something moved, someone moving.  But when she peeks her head out, no one is there.

They’ve been over the basics of this arrangement.  Nene and Amane know each other’s secret; they tie their promises like connected nooses around the other’s neck.  If either of them tries to twist away, to break free, it will only kill them both.

Still, Nene doesn’t have to kill anyone else; Amane can’t and hasn’t made her.  He’s asked her, tempted her, offered it tonight tied up in ropes on a silver platter — but when she’d shook her head, wordless, he’d only shrugged and done the work himself.  All he needs from her is her discretion and maybe her shower, and that’s working just fine for them so far.

Even so, as Nene rinses the shampoo from her hair and the dirt from her nails, she can’t deny how she’d felt looking down at that poor fool, bound and gagged on the ground, one cheek to the concrete and the other to Amane’s shoe: she’d been terrified, yes, and viscerally opposed, sick to her stomach and shaking — but it had been exhilarating, too.  Exciting.  Perched high above them in her skirt suit and heels, Amane offering her the kill but doing the dirty work when she declined, having that power over him, over the victim, over both of them — she’s never felt like that before.

Despite her myriad of fears and twisted desires all mashed together, she doesn’t see Amane for the entire rest of the night.  The next morning, they climb into his car and make off for a diner halfway across the city, all playful small talk and meaningful silences that remind Nene more and more of that moment last night where she’d felt that for the first time Amane was thinking of her as a person and not just another way to kill time.

They get pancakes.  She learns that Amane has a normal degree and a normal apartment and a normal job.  She learns that he likes his coffee with cream and sugar, that he jitters his leg when he thinks too hard, that he has surprisingly nice table manners but for his nasty habit of licking syrup from his fingers.

An assistant, he calls her, all simpering proud like the cat with the canary, speaking in a way only the two of them could understand, in a place where no one they know would think to find them.

Not that either of them know many people.  Nene learns that about him, too: he’s a loner, like her.  Casual work friends, casual acquaintances, on speaking terms with his neighbors — but no close friends, no family, no partner.  Nothing to write home about, and no one to write to.

He looks up mid-lick, tongue still peeking out pink between the gaps of his fingers.  He has nice hands; she’s always thought so, though it’s hard to see them now and not think of them holding someone down or coated in blood, latex gloves sticking tight to the skin with heat and sweat —

There’s a charming glint in his eye when he coos, “Like what you see?”, and Nene is suddenly mortified at her own growing attraction, irritated at herself for even considering it, irritated at Amane for being at the center of it.  She must be debilitatingly lonely if she’s starting to care for a killer — though, she reminds herself sternly, she’s a killer too, now.  They’re the same in that respect, at least.

Nene huffs and wordlessly returns to sawing her food into tiny pieces, the soft pancakes tearing and ripping by the push of her dull knife more than cutting.

A silence falls over them.  Amane quietly sets his silverware down to lean his chin on his hand, watching her.  Nene had been unsettled when he had so obviously not cared about her at all; she had been a shiny new toy in the hand of a child who broke things for fun, and she’d known it.  It was a passing interest, and that interest would fade, and once it did, she had no idea what she would do.

It’s different now; they’re in some sort of limbo, her head on the chopping block but her verdict still being read.  That casual interest is beginning to look something like fascination, and Nene doesn’t know yet whether or not this is a test she even wants to pass — not that she has much of a say in it one way or another.

“Do you like being partners with me?” he asks, eyes alight, knee jittering, nearly begging for her attention.  “Would you do it all again?”

It’s a loaded question.  Nene needed the help that night; she didn’t have the tools or the stamina, physical or emotional, to dispose of that body.  She feels like she should feel guiltier about her coworker, but it’s hard to be very sorry about the culmination of events, really — he had it coming.  He’d been bothering her for months, been too pushy and too friendly and too touchy only when no one else was around, and as much respect as Nene has for life and death both, no one will miss a man like that.  Evidently, no one has.

“I don’t know that I had much of a choice,” she replies, quiet and certain, as honest as she’s willing to be, more honest than she’d meant.  “I needed someone; you were there.”

He hums low in his throat, neutrally curious.  “Do you regret it?”

She recalls with no small amount of vitriol the lecherous smile of her coworker, the condescending way he spoke to her, spoke down to her, made himself at home towering above her desk like he had nothing better to do than bother her.  She’d been there more than a year by the time he’d even joined the company but he’d never respected her as a senior, like she was nothing more than some intern making coffee runs for him, nothing more than a pretty face.  That night in the parking garage, he’d been following her too close, made a few too many menacing comments, been a little too insistent on opening her car door for her — and Nene had let him, because she didn’t want to make a scene, didn’t want to make it a big deal.  It didn’t have to be a big deal; it could be normal, if she just kept it normal.

Then as she sat there, feeling embarrassed and small as he ogled the tops of her thighs where her bunched-up pencil skirt didn’t cover, he’d reached out to brush her hair from her face and she just —

Snapped.

She likes to tell herself that she doesn’t remember anything after that, but she does: remembers kicking her heel into his crotch until he fell back to the dirty ground, remembers stepping on his throat with her full weight, remembers grabbing him by the tie and dragging him half-conscious to her trunk.  Remembers slamming his head into the concrete, then getting the knife from the emergency survival kit she keeps in her car to finish the job.  Remembers with vivid detail the panic of wrapping him in trash bags, left in the back seat from a grocery run she’d been too lazy to take in, more and more and more until her trunk was reasonably safe of blood.  Remembers the drive, white-knuckled and shaking, the endless question repeating in her head like a prayer: What am I going to do now?

That night, in the middle of all of that, Amane had been like a blood-stained vision of an angel, armed with a shovel and just the right kind of nonchalance.  Maybe it’s that relief that bound them, even before any agreements were made: he’d given her something he knew she could never pay back.  It felt divine, righteous, like a second chance or a rebirth; she’s been like a different person ever since, some personified revelation wearing Yashiro Nene’s skin.

“No,” she whispers, confession hushed by the weekend rush in full swing all around them.  “No, I don’t regret it.”

Something about the casual mask of his makes everything Amane says stifling; Nene is constantly on her toes, dodging and anticipating and weighing what is and isn't important all at once.  It makes it both frightening and infuriating when he tilts his head to the side and pleasantly asks, “What if I wanted to turn myself in?  Go to the police, confess my sins — what would you do?  How would you stop me?”

After all the vulnerability she’d just offered him, it feels like a mean line of questioning.  Maybe this is just how he is, mean and callous and uncaring, and maybe all of this is meaningless to him anyway: the killing and planning to kill and killing again.  Maybe he’s just desensitized to it by now.  But it isn’t meaningless to Nene.  Even now, remembering his hands bound in blood and latex, remembering the satisfying feeling of a failed gasp for air under her heel, remembering pulling and scrubbing at her worn tights until they couldn’t stretch anymore, it isn’t meaningless.

She looks him dead in the eye, reeling in her nerves and shaking shoulders as best she can.  “I would kill you first.”

There’s a long, poignant pause as Amane processes her words; then his eyes shut and his entire body shivers; then he pitches forward, elbows on the table, head snapping up like something less than human.  The look on his face is a fine mix of teasing and wonder, the smile curving his lip hard and sharp and almost malicious.  “You know, Yashiro,” he says brightly, “I think I just fell in love with you.”

Nene jabs her fork at a strawberry on top of her pancakes so hard that it rolls right off her plate.  “Fall out of it, then.”

He laughs at her even as he slides out of the booth to pay the bill.  He laughs the whole way back.

That laugh rings in her head for days, weeks, as she waits to see him again; she hears it in her dreams, in her fantasies, echoing through her walls as she falls asleep or clawing at the window as she wakes.  She goes back to work, makes friendly conversation with her coworkers, gets lunch with a friend from high school, calls her mom on the weekends.  In between, she checks her email for a cue, a message, and shrugs it off when it doesn't seem to come.

There’s no denying that she feels different, decidedly changed from the her of some months ago.  In a way, there’s comfort in knowing that: killing someone is such a dramatic upheaval of self that putting yourself together after taking the life of another is never quite perfect, that change ever-present where the cracks don’t quite meet.  At times, Nene feels far away, distant, even numb; sometimes she thinks on it enough to turn her stomach.  Sometimes she cries, clutching her pillow to herself, counting her breaths, fear of and loyalty to Amane the only things keeping her from turning herself in.  Sometimes the high of having gotten away with it sets her very nerves alight.

Still, she wakes up, puts on the same sets of blouses and skirts and heels, staples and sorts and sends the same papers and messages over and over.  Still, she comes home, blows kisses to her hamster, goes to bed.  Rinse, wash, repeat, over and over and over, the easy everyday monotony with an underlying, electric tension, unstable and hot to the touch.

Sitting at her desk, she checks her email for a cue, a message, some incriminating details hidden behind the cipher tucked into her purse — nothing.  Not yet.

Early on, Amane had insisted that the most important thing to not being caught was normalcy, monotony, being perceived by the same people in the same place in the same way.  Nene holds onto that, floating through her head, guiding her actions, held up and respected as some sort of religious doctrine — but the longer she goes without hearing from him, the harder it is.  She gets bags under her eyes, picks at her cuticles, goes longer and longer periods without speaking to much of anyone.

What could she say to these people, knowing that she’s killed one of them?  It feels as if though a line has been drawn by the blood on her hands.  It’s different with Amane; like he’s told her again and again in the short time they’ve known each other, they’re the same.  Even if her killing someone had been equal parts self-defense and impulsive rage, even if it paled in comparison to the no doubt staggering pile of bodies on Amane’s doorstop — they’ve both crossed that line.

She doesn’t regret it, not exactly; she doesn’t exactly feel she was wrong.  Frankly, of the people she could have killed, she’s happy it had been who it was.  But the change that has come over her since then, the noose around her neck — the longer she spends away from Amane, it feels less exciting, less exhilarating, less empowering, and more just like that.  Like a noose; like an ending.

There’s a good, solid distance in between Nene’s front door and the light switch.  In the morning, daylight streaming in brilliantly through even the smallest gaps in her blinds, she completely forgets this distance exists; that forgetfulness persists for hours, until she gets home from work.  Standing at her unlocked door, her back to the chilly night air, it opens before her like a great, yawning mouth.  After that, it’s like a timer switched on: every moment in between the door being opened and the lights being on is just begging for danger.  She’s feared it as long as she’s lived here

Sometimes, she imagines she’ll find Amane there, in the dark — or he’ll find her, a caress down her neck from an unseen hand, a rough tug to her wrist, a knife in her gut.  Sometimes that vision terrifies her completely immobile, shock-still frozen at her own front door like an uninvited guest.  Sometimes it pushes a shaky breath from her lungs, a stammering beat in her chest, ripe with anticipation just as surely as with fear as she steps willingly into the dark.

But night after night, her trembling fingers find the switch with no incident, the lights flicking on sterile white, and Amane isn’t there.

Time passes.  Nene spends her days the same as always, sans her unlikely friend.  First, she misses him; then she’s angry at him; then she worries.  She starts reading the news religiously, upon waking up or in the middle of her lunch breaks, increasingly certain that something must have happened, that he must be in trouble, must be dead or in jail or worse.

She digs deeper.  Amane doesn’t have much by way of social media, but with enough persistence and sleepless nights she tracks down his photo, grainy and unflattering, on a company website.  She searches that company name, too, anxious for gossip or scandal, but turns up nothing.  She searches his model of car to see if one from the area has been reported stolen — nothing.  She checks missing persons reports — nothing.  A whole sea of faces spreads itself thin before her, several of them probably some fault of Amane’s, maybe even hers, but the piercing eyes she’s looking for just aren’t there.

Very quickly, the fear makes the extent of her attachment blindly apparent to her, even if she can’t tell still quite what kind of attachment it is.  Does she like Amane as an ally, a friend, something more?  Is she interested in him as a man?  Does she like him, really, genuinely like him, or are they just tied together so firmly and desperately now that she doesn't know what to do in his absence?  Has he encouraged her to lean on him this much?  Did he do it on purpose?

On a particularly crazed evening, she clocks out a half hour early and peels out of the parking structure, already speeding, already typing in the address to his workplace that she’d found in her search.  It’s a short drive, but it feels like forever; she bakes in her car under the summer sun and tells herself it’s fine, it’s not a big deal, she just needs to see him, even if from far away, as unlikely as catching even a glimpse of him might be.

Luck must be on her side, though: she fibs her way into the company lot easily enough, and can’t have been parked longer than a minute when she sees a familiar shock of black hair atop a familiar figure, meandering casually out of the building.  He’s whistling, she thinks disbelievingly; she’s been thinking he could be dead in a ditch somewhere, and he has a suit jacket slung over his arm and a spring in his step and he’s whistling.

Shaking with uncertainty and potentially unfair anger, she zips out into the street as fast as she can.  Eyes firmly ahead of her, she doesn’t see a familiar face jerk up to trace her silhouette through her side window.

It takes hours of aimless driving and aimless crying and aimless stopping to stare aimlessly out into the distance before she finally makes herself go home.  In that time, it only gets darker, even the light of the full moon doing little to reassure her as she unlocks her front door.  Her mind is a mess; she feels worthless, discarded, lost in the absence of her secret ally and only friend.  Stepping inside, she toes her shoes off in the same breath that she slides the deadbolt home before beginning her nightly ritual of finding her way through the dark.

A step away, a moment before her fingers meet the switch, someone coughs wetly in her kitchen.  Though Nene’s blood freezes in her veins, her hand doesn’t freeze with it, and half a breath later her apartment is all but flooded in light.

There, sprawled weak and barely upright on the floor, is Amane.  He’s in the same clothes she’d seen him leaving work in some hours before, except that now they’re covered in broad swipes and deep stains of something dark.  He’s a little too bright-eyed, even for him, hair pushed sloppy and sticky away from his forehead.

“Hi there, Yashiro,” he croaks with a stuttering wave; his tie is tied tight around the center of his palm and dyed a deep, dark red, and it is at this point that Nene realizes the stains on his clothes are not dirt or paint, but blood.

She drops her bag, its contents sprawling messy across her entryway as she takes him in.  In this moment, still cloaked in the maelstrom of feelings that’s been enveloping her in his absence, she’d love to say something charming or witty or impressive or detached, but all that comes out is, breathlessly, “Amane.”

He grins, “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” and she wants to kill him, wants to kiss him, wants to make him sorry for leaving and unable to ever leave again.

But she isn’t about to let him bleed out on her kitchen floor.  “You,” she stammers, crossing the room to hover over him, “you — What are you doing here?  Did you break in?”  Exasperated and  panicked and still residually resentful, she motions widely to his injuries.  “What happened to you?”

Slumping into her counter, clutching at his side, Amane eyes her warily.  She wonders if he can feel her mood like tasting a storm in the air, if that uneasiness is all that’s keeping him upright at the moment.  “Stabbed a guy.  Got stabbed.”  He clears his throat, but it doesn't do anything to smooth the sandpaper of his voice.  “All in a day’s work.”

Nene allows herself one shaky inhale before she shrugs her jacket off and scuttles away to the bathroom.  “Stay there,” she orders over her shoulder when she hears him start to follow her.  “Tell me more.  What happened?  Where are you hurt?”

Maybe the blood loss has made him more obedient, because Amane complies with very little fuss.  He’d been sloppy, impatient; he didn’t tie the victim up first; he fought back, hard.  Got a solid kick in the sternum and a rough bite of Amane’s arm in before snatching the knife out of Amane’s hand, managing to get him across the ribs before Amane got it back and killed him.

The ribs — Nene’s heart seems to freeze in her chest.  Kneeling on the tile before Amane, she tries to keep her hands and voice from shaking as she unbuttons his shirt.  “And your palm?”

Amane looks at his hand almost surprised, like he’d forgotten it was injured altogether.  “The knife handle slips when you’ve gotten enough blood on you,” he says casually.  “Rookie mistake.  Like I said, I was sloppy.”

Sloppy.  There’s blood all over him, both his and his victim's, thick black ooze saturated into the folds of his clothes or fading into red where it’s streaked across her floor.  He looks awful; she can see the beginning of a bruise forming yellow and blue in the center of his chest, just below his collarbone, roughly the size and shape of a human foot, a rough gouged out wound half-hidden under his rolled up sleeves.  There’s a glassy look to his eye, skin damp and slightly cool to the touch, a confusing pallor to his face that makes him look like something inhuman.  He’s a wreck, vulnerable and hurt, pain laced through every stitch of his voice.

And he’d come to Nene.  Something dangerous blooms vibrant behind her teeth: she can put him back together again.  She could ruin him, if she wanted to.

He’s so weak right now.  If she put her hands around his throat, would he be able to fight back?  Would he even want to?  As far as anyone knows, the two of them are strangers, just like it’s supposed to be, just like he is with all of his victims; if she stepped on his collarbone until it cracked, snapped his head into the corner of her counter, slit his throat with the same knife he’d offered to her all those nights ago, would anyone know?  If she buried him in one of the spots he’d taken her too, using his car, his tools, could anyone ever catch her?

Her fingers skim the slice across his ribs, but he doesn’t wince; his pale eyes only continue to stare into her, as piercing and intense as the first time they’d met, just two strangers sharing a secret in the dark.  A grin twists his mouth halfheartedly, voice breathless with exertion.  “How’s it looking, doctor?”

Nene may not be a medical professional of any kind, but even she knows stabs to the ribs are almost always fatal; the torso is a great mass of very essential organs stuffed into the smallest possible container.  But as she makes herself at home with Amane’s injury, cleaning it and pressing a cloth to it and prodding her fingers into it until blood seeps under her nails, she thinks incredulously that Amane might just be the luckiest person in the world.  “I think the knife went down your ribs, instead of between,” she reports, wide-eyed, ignoring his hisses of pain as she continues her investigation.  “You’re all sliced up, but…”

“I won’t die?”

“Not from this.”

Amane looks off somewhere past her, momentarily stunned.  “Huh.”

While Amane holds a fresh cloth to his ribs, Nene does her best to clean the bite to his forearm.  It’s ugly and grotesque and makes her stomach turn to look at, a rough chunk of flesh gone or barely there at all; after consulting the internet, she gives Amane the nearest wooden item to bite down on (a wooden spoon handle — he’s in the middle of griping about it when she shoves it into his mouth) and cuts off as much of the dangling flesh as she can handle with her hastily-sterilized scrapbooking scissors while he makes the most horrible noises she’s ever heard from a human in her life.  Considering what she’s gotten up to lately, that’s saying something.

By this point, Amane is sweating through his clothes, his skin as cold as death.  It makes sense; he’s lost a lot of blood.  But Nene doesn't exactly have the facilities to DIY a blood transfusion, and taking him to the hospital isn’t an option unless she wants both of them to go away forever.  Biting her lip, she wills her hands to move faster, his wounds to close faster, this night to pass faster.

Around the time that she’s sterilizing thread and stitching him back together like fixing a fraying hem, Amane begins struggling to keep his eyes open.  Swallowing her panic until it’s nothing more than a high pitch to her voice, Nene decides she needs to get him talking; he is not allowed to fall unconscious, not when he’s lost so much blood.

“So,” she says, almost conversational, needle slipping between her nervous fingers, “why come here?”

By now, Amane is so weak it takes visible effort for him to turn his head to better face her.  “I needed someone,” he rasps lamely, echoing her words from the last time they saw each other in that sunny, innocuous diner.  “You were here.”

Nene almost laughs at the absurdity of the situation, the weird sentimental weight the words carry and the way they make her throat feel tight.  “Does that mean my debt is repaid?”

“Who knows,” Amane croaks with something that might have been a shrug.  “But even still — you won’t leave me, will you, Yashiro?”

Frowning at her uneven stitches, she ignores the violently possessive lilt to his voice, and fights off some violently possessive urges of her own.

Amane’s head clunks heavy to the cabinet door behind him, finally drawing Nene’s eyes to him.  He looks terrible: sticky and grotesque, every vein in his eyes red and engorged, every vein in his face brightly visible.  “Aren’t we partners?” and his voice is barely more than a rasp, “We’re bound, you and I; we’re the same.”

Even bloody up the elbows, Nene has the immediate, knee-jerk instinct to deny it, but she doesn’t.  Instead, she ties off the last stitch to Amane’s ribs and takes his hand, pressing it and a fresh washcloth to the wound.  When she finally speaks, her voice is quiet.  “Why were you so careless tonight?  So hurried?”  After a moment, she adds, almost a whisper, “Why haven’t you called for me?”

His grin shutters and falls into a grim, hard line, his cold hand under hers balling into a fist.  Instead of answering, his gaze slides straight into hers.  “It was careless,” he agrees around a cough.  “Messy, lots of blood — his and mine.  I could get caught.”

When his hand flips suddenly to reach greedy for hers, the rag drops into his lap like he couldn’t care less, like it doesn’t matter even a fraction as much as feeling her skin on his.  “Didn’t you say you’d kill me if I could implicate you?”

She did, and she’d meant it, too; even now, there is a part of her that means it; she’s thought about a hundred ways to kill him since she first saw him here, helpless and needy on her floor.

But she means it, too, when she slowly replies, “You haven’t betrayed my trust.  I won’t betray yours.”

Amane’s eyes widen.  That too-much, too-fast, too-late feeling freezes in Nene’s gut, her foot above the puddle, her weight coming down — but he only laughs, hand dropping limp from hers and back to the floor.

There’s a lazy sort of resignation painted over him; he beams at her like the sun.  “You know, Yashiro — you always manage to surprise me.”

When Nene’s done patching him up to the best of her abilities, swaddling him in the better part of her medicine cabinet, she peels his ruined shirt from his body and sets to unbuckling his belt, swatting his hands away when he makes to help.  Seeing Amane shirtless had felt very distant, medical; she faintly acknowledged the presence of unexpected muscle across his arms and chest, the appealing line of his collarbone, but it had been hard to do much more than that when she thought he might bleed out at any moment on her kitchen floor.

Now that he’s more stable, though, more coherent and present and himself, that distance feels as if though it’s beginning to fall away.  Her fingers stall on the cool metal of the buckle, only halfway undone and unspeakably intimate between her fingers.  It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t have to mean anything — but it doesn’t feel that way, not with the way she hesitates, not with the way that Amane is shock-still, staring at her like he could eat her alive.

His hand covers hers, and she can feel his pulse rushing through his skin.  It’s an anchor in the dark, and she clings to it, all her rage and despair and panic and love springing up and out of her at once as she twines their fingers together and digs her nails in deep to the back of his hand.

“Promise me you won’t leave again,” she breathes, face twisting into some grotesque mask of herself as she grapples with whatever it is swirling in a maelstrom inside her: she wants to murder him, make love to him, carve her mark so surely into him that even the scar will spell her name.  She wants to see him choke on his own blood because it’s what she wanted, to keep him forever because it’s what she wanted, for him to give himself over willingly, body and soul, a memory for her to carry long after he’s gone.

Instead of that, though, any of that, any of the willingness and any of the promises, he smiles at her.  The distant glow of the bathroom light down the hall lines the edges of his teeth sharp, and he tucks her hair neatly behind her ear, tenderly caressing her throat, before grabbing hold of the back of her neck and dragging her down into a kiss.

His mouth tastes like blood, salty and metallic, but it’s warm: warmer than the rest of him, warmer than she is.  He grins when she gasps, trying to yank her closer, but he’s weak with blood loss; she wrestles his hands down, pinning his wrists to the counter, before coming closer anyway.

When she settles into kneeling above him, she’s acutely aware of her skirt bunched up around her hips, the way his half-undone belt buckle rests just below her as an invitation.  She’s hot with arousal and all the bad decisions that brought her here, brushing her hands gently through his filthy hair and then pulling hard enough that he bites her.  His roaming hands, already bold, trace all the way up from the backs of her thighs to just under her ass, knuckle tracing teasingly down the center seam of her tights before they rip them open, exposing her underwear and precious inches of her legs.

Pulling away with a gasp, she sets her forehead against his.  There’s a fluttering sort of nervous jolt in her gut that she hasn’t felt in years, a sort of shocked spontaneity, as if though it hasn’t been building to this since the first time she’d set eyes on him.  “Should we,” she starts, losing her breath and her words every time his fingers brush over the bare skin of her now exposed inner thigh, “should we — Maybe you need rest, or some orange juice, or — ”

He nuzzles into her neck and bites hard: hard enough that she cries out, hard enough to leave an imprint of his teeth.  She envisions him biting even harder until she bleeds, until she has a wound on her neck as deep and awful as the one on his arm, and shudders at the way that mental image makes her light up inside.

“Is that what you want?” he asks, desperation and want and leftover exhaustion fraying his put-on composure, and she wants to wreck him, to see that composure completely dissolve into nothing in her hands.  “To stop?”

She laughs, short and disbelieving.  “No, it isn’t,” she admits, giddy with the relief of voicing it aloud, and pulls his hair back hard enough that the back of his head meets her cabinet with a crack.  He doesn’t even react, too busy surging up to kiss her, and she grinds down onto his belt and his hips pitch up to meet her and he whispers her things she can’t hear around the taste of blood in his mouth.

When his fingers slide home inside her, she’s already dripping wet.

Later, when it’s late enough that even the road outside has quieted into a muffled purr, a freshly-showered Nene wraps her robe tighter around herself and joins Amane on the balcony.  He looks kind of silly clad in Nene’s baggiest pair of sweatpants and a big sweater left over from an ex years ago, collar studded with loose threads and tiny holes as if a testament to its long-standing service.  Even so, the expression on his face takes her breath away: solemn and almost wistful, lips slightly parted as he gazes at something well beyond the horizon.

He’s lovely, desaturated and glowing by moonlight, the smoke from his cigarette curling around and behind him like an angel’s wings.  When she leans onto the rail beside him, she sees with no small amount of relief that some of his color is back, his breathing more even, his eyes more focused; he’s very obviously still recovering, but he looks less like a corpse and more like a romantic rendition of a corpse, some artist’s homage to death, vivid and indiscernible and smudged out into nothing in the corners.

The cold metal railing is enough to make Nene shiver, even the last clings of the summer heat beginning their yearly surrender into autumn.  Greedy for warmth and acknowledgement, she shuffles closer to Amane to tuck herself tight into his chest, her back to his front, the two of them gazing into the sky together.

“Those are going to kill you someday, you know,” she says lightheartedly when he takes another slow drag, wrinkling her nose at the strange, cloying smell.

Amane leans down just to blow smoke in her face.  “Nicotine-free,” he grins.  “Can’t you smell the cotton candy?”

His smile seems strained, not that Nene has any ideas on how to fix that; she watches his eyes slide from hers to her mouth to somewhere beyond her, over the balcony.  Either of them could throw the other over it, she finds herself thinking, if they really wanted to — but they stay pressed together anyway, inches from the railing, like some measure of implicit trust.

Suddenly, Amane speaks.  “I was going to kill you,” he says, casual but for the slow drag of painful wanting in his voice, the achey sort of restraint.

Maybe it should be a surprise, but it isn’t; they’ve been toeing this line all along, after all, even if neither of them had wanted to say it out loud.  “When?”

“All along,” he murmurs, almost dreamy.  “At first, that first night, just because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time — but you were so fresh, so interesting.  I wanted to know more.  I told myself I’d clean up after I got to know you just a little bit more.”

Another drag.  “The more I got to know you, the more I wanted to know, the more I wanted to kill you.  It was — it became unbearable.  The last time we were together, I wanted it so bad I could have done it then and there, damn getting caught, damn getting away with it, damn any of it.  It didn’t matter; it was like the whole world just… fell away.”

He puts the cigarette out on her railing before dropping it carelessly over the edge of the balcony, embers glittering the whole way down.  When he speaks again, his voice is low, rough, edged with strain.  “That was why I couldn’t see you, and why I was so careless tonight.  No one else measures up; no one else scratches the itch, not like they used to, not when I’m thinking of you.  And tonight, I was… frustrated.  Impatient.”

Something proud and content shakes to life in her chest, cheeks flushed and pulse racing like a flattered schoolgirl.  “Insatiable?” she teases, though her squeaky pitch makes it less confident and sexy than intended.

A laugh bursts surprised from Amane’s mouth; he muffles it in her hair.  “You’re taking this well.”

Nene shrugs.  “You’re not subtle.”

“Neither are you,” he murmurs, husky and quiet, lips just a breath away from the shell of her ear.

She wants to deny it, but can’t, really; sheepishly, she swallows and changes the subject.  “Why didn’t you?” she asks, feeling a little bit like she’s stumbling into a lion’s den.  “I mean, if you wanted to that badly — you know where I live.  It would have been easy.”

He hums thoughtfully.  “But then it would be over.”

To any night owl passerby who thought to look up at the high-up apartment balconies, they must look like a normal, close, intimate couple: twisted up in each other, Amane’s hands on the railing ahead of her, her head leaned back on his chest, his lips to her temple.  Nene watches his knuckles whiten on the rail and thinks that they wouldn’t be wrong, exactly: there is an intimacy in this.  Even if it isn’t the intimacy she would have expected; even if it isn’t the intimacy anyone but her would have chosen.

“I would love to kill you,” he whispers into her ear, all soft and slow like any other lover’s vow, “to split you open, empty you out, and fill you up with me.  But I could only do it once; I know that.  The ultimate kill, the ultimate high, with the ultimate price.”

He chuckles low, kissing the crown of her head.  “I guess I’m just not ready to pay up yet.”

It should frighten her, what Amane is saying — should disturb her, should have her running already.  If she was a normal person, this would be more than a dealbreaker; if she was a normal person, she’d never be in this situation in the first place.

Unfortunately for Nene’s sensibilities, it’s kind of romantic.  She shuffles further back into his arms and lays her hand over his forearm, putting uncomfortable pressure on the thick pad of gauze packed into the bite wound she’d only barely managed to clean up.

“I could kill you first,” she pitches, like suggesting what to have for dinner, and he laughs just before spinning her around and kissing her.

Before, on the kitchen floor, it had been her on top, her in control, her digging her nails into his tender flesh enough to risk the stitches she’d just put in.  This time, he leads.  He sets her on the thin railing, leaving her clutching his sweater and relying on his hands for balance as she teeters precariously on the narrow strip of metal; but she hardly even has time to consider it as he kisses her senseless.  The taste of blood has been traded for the familiar mint of her toothpaste and she wonders when she’ll get that taste again, dragging him closer and deeper and rougher like that will change any of it.

It sparks something heady and cloying in her to see Amane in her clothes, smelling like her, tasting like her, and she’s slipping a hand under his sweater before she can think better of it.  Her thumb brushes the jut of his hipbone and he gasps, lips pulling away, hands slipping from her back —

Nene only experiences the sensation of falling for a split second before he’s steadying her again.  She should be scared, but when she comes back from the rushing in her ears she’s already laughing, and Amane is pressing quick pecks all over her face and mouth like some morbid parody of domestic bliss, a happy couple painted over a used canvas, the old image still showing through in the light.

“The stars are nice tonight,” he sighs once they’ve calmed down a little, kiss-bitten lips curving loose into a smile.  “I didn’t know you could still see them this far into the city.”

“You can’t,” Nene replies; she would know, she’s lived here long enough — but sure enough when she turns, despite the city air, despite everything, the stars gleam bright over the tops of all the buildings.

Staring at that impossible sight, Nene wonders where she would be if she’d never met Amane, if this summer had never happened at all; it feels impossible to even consider.  They’re bound together, the two of them, inextricably tangled so desperately and surely that even dying does not really guarantee escape.

They’re the same, the two of them, the only two people on this side of the line.  She already knows the worst thing he’s ever done; he already knows hers.

Maybe that’s not love, not yet.  Maybe it could be.

Amane’s hand covers hers where it rests against the railing, his chilled skin nearly the same temperature as the metal.  Willingly trapped under his loving hold, Nene stays there, watching the last vestiges of summer wither and die, her heart in his hands, his blood still drying under her nails.