[ closed ] well, it's all I used to believe.

[errandry]

When; January 18th, well after this.
Rating; PG-13, for Agito.
Characters; two-thirds of Kogarasumaru!
Summary; One bright day in the middle of the night.
Log;

There was nothing about this that wasn't a bad idea.

Kazu had a hazy idea of the areas and hours Agito liked to run—kind of the same way, he suspected, fish would mark off certain parts of the ocean in their tiny fish-brains with red alert warnings: DO NOT SWIM HERE—PREDATORS ABIDE. A few months ago, he wouldn't have needed more information; the idea of calling Agito to account felt not unlike tying a red scarf to one's face in a bull pen, and only Ikki would do that. But that was the funny thing about time—pretty much the only funny thing. Time passed, and the passing kicked you down and hauled you through paradoxes until your boss was waking up in the next room with all the wrong accessories, and the only thing you could think of doing was to keep running.

Towards something, though, not away—and that idea was a new one.

(That goddamn wheelchair. If the deities hadn't picked that moment in time out on purpose, Kazu'd eat his own hat. Of course, the conversation had died as soon as Kogarasumaru's leader had bitched them out of it, casual and oblivious as it was. And Kazu'd let it go 'cause what could he say? But the thought hadn't gone anywhere. That was the point, wasn't it?)

He yanked himself out of his thoughts as the throng of buildings slid low, opened into cleared, flatter spaces. Stranger grounds. Winter had begun to ebb out of the City—but that still left flashes of ice on sidewalks here and there, and air like swallowing knives. Kazu kept his breaths shallow as he wove around the slippery patches. He ducked his head low, pulled his collar stiff and his gloves tight over his knuckles. Headlong he went, cutting sparks and speed out of the dark, straight into shark country.

He had the night to look, and the advantage: Agito wasn't running from him anyway.

Comments

[sixwinged]

It was never difficult to sniff out Kazu.

Not that it was difficult to sniff out the rest of Kogarasumaru. They all had their own styles, their own little tells, and with the complete lack of trecks in this pocket dimension, it wasn’t hard at all to figure out who it was, coming through this area.

He stopped mid-run, sliding across a bit of debris that had settled on the ground, and causing the dirt under his feet to scatter, before settling back down. If Kazu had bothered to come out in this area, it was obvious enough what he was after: him. Whatever he wanted, there was no point in delaying it; Agito had things to do (except not really not really).

Fingers moved, to slip into the pockets of his jacket. The chilling winter air hadn’t been enough to keep him inside-- but that didn’t mean it wasn’t freezing his hands. He didn’t need them to run, so it didn’t matter as far as Agito was concerned. After stopping-- it was more annoying than anything else.

Instead of adding in the snide comment, or the obvious sign that he was more than irritated at being interrupted during his own time, he waited for Kazu to stop near him, to voice out whatever it was he thought was important enough to march into shark territory during running hours. It better have been important, too. Otherwise, Agito would make sure the other left this conversation full of fangs.

[errandry]

He hadn't expected the easy catch—it threw him off-balance, but that wasn't a tough recovery to make. If Agito was actually offering leeway, he wasn't going to waste it. Kazu rolled to a halt much as Agito had, dug a heel against the brake and stopped with a few feet between them. A little gust scythed through and he gritted his teeth, biting back a cold-grown stammer.

"Tch—sorry," he managed, by reflex as much as feeling. For all the rules that Storm Riders didn't hold between themselves, he was pretty sure that don't break into another guy's run uninvited was pretty high on the list of the few they did. He palmed the back of his hat, a brief flare of restlessness. It dimmed as he stepped forward. "Couldn't catch you before." The words ground awkwardly between his teeth, leaden with all the reasons he wasn't saying—and how messed up it was that they even existed. Since when did they keep anything from the boss? What kind of backwards alternate universe was this anyway?

Not that those were the places he wanted to start. A glance swept the ground before it flickered back—just a little bit watchful. "You got time right now?"

[sixwinged]

“You should be sorry.” His tone was gruff- a hint he was sure Kazu would get. He didn’t appreciate it, being interrupted. Yet at the same time, he wasn’t sending kicks to the other’s gut yet. Kazu knew well enough, it had to have been damned important. The sentence was obvious enough. Agito was always there, there were plenty of opportunities to call him out.

Turning himself around, Agito looked to Kazu, eyebrow raising in questioning. Still no kicks, they were off to a good start. “No, I don’t have fucking time. Not time to waste on you, at least.” Yet despite the words, he was staying exactly where he was, wasn’t turning himself around and leaving again. “Five minutes, you have five minutes to give me enough of a reason why I shouldn’t shove my Sand Tigers down your throat before I do just that.”

Which was the best possible scenario Kazu could have gotten. The go-ahead to speak.

[errandry]

"Yeah, yeah."

His knuckles chafed in the cold. The run had kept him warm on the way; in its absence, Kazu found it a lot harder to stay still. He jammed his hands into his pockets and tried not to fidget—remembering nature programmes with his sister cooking in the background, narrators saying: predators hunt by movement. The menace slid off of him with a roll of a shoulder. Threats from Agito were a lot like breathing: air in, brutal promises out. It was how you knew he was alive.

As always in moments like these, a small voice rose in the shadows of his mind: he could be elsewhere, he could be on his laptop, he could be knotted into his blankets and oblivious to any problem at all. Hell, he'd been through this and the leadership had been lifted from him. Things had gone back to normal then—they'd go back to normal again, so why'd they even have to bother with this charade?

But he knew the answer: because then isn't now. Maybe time didn't move fast enough after all.

He let it go. Lifted his chin. Focused. "Okay." When it came down to the wire, the question was pretty simple, and Kazu spoke it loud into the thin air. "We still taking team challenges or not?"

[sixwinged]

The idea had gone through his head several times before. With Ikki here, things got much more complicated than they had been before arrived. The crow had staked his claim, went out of his way to do so even. If there was someone who bothered with that sort of crap around here, it wouldn’t go unnoticed. Agito couldn’t say he knew the types that roamed around this area much-- he met a few, but it wasn’t as if he went around with the purpose of being social, and picking up on things like that.

Team battles hadn’t been a concern, with the lack of air trecks in this place. Himself, Kazu, Gazelle(he assumed), and the very small chance that Kaito still had his own when coming here. No one to worry about--- and Ikki didn’t even have his trecks, leaving all those team challenges he might have started up to Kazu and Agito.

Not that they couldn’t handle them without “Can you handle it, Beanpole? It’d be you and me, and with all the crazy, fucked up things out there we have no fucking idea what they might throw at us.”

[errandry]

"It's not like we're seriously conquering the place." The words jumped to his tongue—quick, too quick, and even inside his own head Kazu heard it with the resonance of an excuse. A bad one. He fought down a wince, fought down dread and the thought that Agito didn't do real caution, never had—that their odds had to be pretty bad if he was talking about backing down instead of more rigorous training and maybe kicking the rest of them around just for endurance's sake.

(Not that Kazu couldn't have guessed—slow as he was, still, slow all the time, with a flash-flame scorched beneath his eyelids every time he closed his eyes. The shadow of a man he couldn't catch, with a furred coat and the world's strangest smile.)

"It's just territory, right?" he said aloud—and 'territory' was an understood term. A hand raked at his hair, found hat in the way and rumpled it as he considered. Contrary to popular belief, contrary to the bastard Akito called a father, they were Storm Riders. That came with a certain set of expectations all its own, heavy and inflexible as a contract. "Anybody who wants it'll have to negotiate the fight with us anyway."

And Agito knew how to set terms to a fight, and Kazu—well, he knew how to play sacrifice. That was how they worked.

[sixwinged]

“No, that fucking crow just proclaimed we were taking it over as part of our territory, and that he was going for more. As Storm Riders, but does anyone here really understand that?” As far as Agito would come to think? No, since no one else here seemed to even know what a Storm Rider was at all. Or Air
Trecks. Some didn’t even understand what roller blades were-- and a good portion of the people here could do things Agito wouldn’t have thought were possible outside of manga and other medias similar to that.

Not that they were exactly normal either. Twisting his lips up into a grin, Agito moved closer to Kazu, one gloved hand raising to shove his fingers through the strands of dark blue hair. “Then shut your mouth and stop asking such useless questions, idiot. We’re Kogarasumaru.” The ones who followed Ikki, who would until he reached the top of the tower-- and further.

Raising up a leg, he sent the front of his air treck right into Kazu’s side-- not a hard kick per se, but definitely enough to leave a bruise, with the way his sand tigers were pointed.

“If you have time to come all the way out here, you have time to work on that trick of yours. Fuck! A different place like this without other storm riders isn’t a excuse to slack off! If we’re gong to fight, we have to be prepared for whatever crap this place throws at us.”

[errandry]

"So we'll make 'em get it," he said, on a reckless and easy breath. Agito hadn't said: the fuck makes you think our rules apply here? He hadn't said: what do you know? Kazu didn't need much more ground to stand on. The slightest breath was enough to catch flame; a lack of denial was all the way in he'd ask for. He might have said more, or he might not have—but a chill swelled, hollow and prickling in his skin, and he lost track of all thought as a shark swaggered into his space. Colder than winter, than the scattered ice around—and then even that impression tumbled out of his head as Agito's heel connected with his side. Kazu staggered without falling. Too surprised to succumb, maybe.

He steadied himself, braced a hand against a knee and the first thought that rose from the tumult was not hard enough. He was getting away pretty light, by Agito's standards.

That didn't mean Agito had to get away with it too.

A breath hissed between his teeth in the wake of Agito's lazy snarl: white air, tell-tale signs of life in the cold. Kazu exhaled—and then, to an outsider's eye, vanished.

He knew the steps by now—had them memorised from outlining each painstaking curve out of the tangle when he'd first come up with the idea. It hadn't gotten a whole lot easier, but the pattern had smoothed. He'd learned it. Let the wheels pull warmth out of the unyielding damp, sheer heat twisting into sparks. Break them under the vibrations of other kicks, stifled and stuttering—not dimmed but reduced, invisible for the handful of heartbeats he needed. He spun them as close to Agito as he dared. Gave it a leeway of two seconds before the fire would flare up—just behind a Fang King's heels, a tripwire.

He stopped, then, two feet away, and let time come rushing back in a storm of sound and snow and empty ruins. The world around was crowding with shadows, barely sky at all for the dark. The ache in his side had stitched into knots. He clenched his fingers over it, scarcely feeling the cold, and looked to catch Agito's eye.

"Bastard," he panted, but he was grinning when he said it. "That hurt."

We're Kogarasumaru.

[sixwinged]

He only needed to see Kazu disappear for a second to know the other was up to something. The second that form vanished, his gaze shifted, looking around him for any sign of that god damned beanie hat. Yet it was as hard to spot a speeding beanpole as it would be to see- well, something moving at the speed of light.

Agito’s left heel raised, balancing the weight of that foot on the front wheel of his air trecks-- and that was when those flames picked up. Giving him plenty of reason to move forward, his own feet moving in a similar pattern to the one Kazu had used, almost mimicking the moves he had seen when Kazu was showing off the trick the first time Agito was introduced to it as he himself moved around the other -- but much slower, of course.

The flames picked up fast, and instead of flames that didn’t even lick at his toes, these ones were building high. It was good the floor was covered in dirt and bits of cement, because if Agito had tried that near greenery; well it probably wouldn’t end well. Anyone could make flames by his words, sure. That didn’t mean he was particularly skilled with it.

His lips twisted up into a grin, one that spoke in a different tone the other’s was giving. They were in shark territory, Kazu’s stunt wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t wanted, and him showing off wasn’t very smart at all. Agito didn’t need to see him show off. He knew Kazu’s skill level already, showing off wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

“Is that all you came to ask, beanpole? Or did you come to get a taste of my fang, too?" Yet there weren't any more answers offered, no.

[errandry]

Adrenaline kicked in his veins like a pulse. Agito twisted, and Kazu tracked each spin and step—bad idea, bad idea, bad idea—watching fire bolt into being with the cutting and vicious exactness that was the way Agito dealt with everything. Feeling heat surge in a wall, hot and feverish cold flicking at his hair and twisting in his throat—and there was a thrill underneath it all, too, that had nothing to do with either. Agito was the better rider, always would be, and as long as that held true, Kazu could throw it all at him. He'd already lost. There was a kind of freedom in the thought—

—along with the same treacherous whispers: you never actually ran against him, right? how do you know you couldn't land a scratch?

He ducked his head a little. In the blur past his lashes, in livid and hungry lights, the flames wore on. Kazu kept his hands in his pockets and let the night burn. He had a long way to go before meeting that challenge would be worth it. But a grin coiled at the corners of his mouth anyway—because whatever this had been, it'd been spoken. It was a start. He was bruised and out of breath and still this was exactly what he'd needed.

Just this, no more.

"Shit," Kazu muttered, and shut his eyes against a laugh—unsteady but nearly fearless for once, feeling certainty through a daze. Time would pass, and they had wars to wage meanwhile. If this was going to be their territory, they really would have to watch out. "Not tonight, all right? But sometime." He glanced at Agito again, mouth dry and hands at his sides. No restless tics—just a stupid promise he'd live to regret. But since when had Kogarasumaru lived by caution, anyway? "I'll get there! Just wanted to make sure."

[sixwinged]

Agito stopped just barely in front of where he had been before, the tips of his fingers keeping themselves just barely tucked into his pockets, ready to raise in case-- this scuffle went any further than it had already. Not that Kazu was the sort, he knew better than to think that. A hit to the head, a kick to the gut or anything in between was plenty, for the beanpole. Agito didn’t need to take it any farther than that-- well, he would, but.

Stopping right behind the flames he had created, Agito tilted his head back, looking towards Kazu through them as they died down. His eye remained trained on that stupid white beanie, watching, waiting for just the slightest of reasons to use those hooks attached to his pants. A reason to let loose, something he hadn’t been able to do since arriving here.

Yet then that answer was coming, and it was obvious enough they were done for now. No carving his bloody road into that stupid thin body (not that he would be satisfied with that at all, considering Agito did consider him a teammate, if anything) and no more flames to lick at his heels.

“Are you done here, then? Fuck, I have better things to do than listen to you, remember? If you’re going to stand around like a fucking idiot, then get lost.”

[errandry]

He was coming away mostly unbloodied, whole-boned and with the answers he'd wanted. This, Kazu was pretty sure, was goddamn good luck—the kind you blessed and didn't press.

If you weren't an idiot with better priorities, anyway.

"One last thing," he admitted, and the words came to his mouth like an apology—the excuse pressed ahead of the rest, raised like a shield before Agito could cut his tongue out of his mouth with a wheel-swipe for taking too much time. Despite the sinking flames, the night felt hot; even the cut of wind seemed an echo of fever chills, raising hairs 'til sweat prickled along his skin. Kazu tugged at his hair, dragged the beanie off with the motion, and stood, absently stretching it between two hands. He lingered, asked his last questions without being prompted—because if he was running on good luck alone, who knew how much longer it'd hold?

"How much'd you tell him, anyway?"

The he and how much didn't need explaining. There was only so much they were keeping back. Stuff like the future—things they could reconcile to themselves because he'd find out whether they told him or not. Stuff that, unnumbered, made it easier to pretend that the wheelchair was anything like normal.

[sixwinged]

One last thing.

Kazu had already interrupted him, already ran around attempting to show off like his trick was any good (which it wasn’t, as far as Agito was concerned), and now he was asking for one last thing. No, it wasn’t bad. Yes, if Agito had been a ‘normal’ person, that wouldn’t have bothered him at all. He would have asked what, answered it, and moved on.

The question had enough merit, just enough that he wasn’t sending another kick into Kazu’s side. Yet, at least. “Nothing. I haven’t told him shit about anything.” No, Akito had been coddling up to him, team times were spent doing obnoxious things, not discussing the time Ikki had missed out on back in their world. At least, if the wheel chair and broken leg was from that point. It could have been from after the battle-- maybe Ikki had gotten hurt then. It hadn’t come up, and back here in this pocket dimension, Agito didn’t think it mattered much anyway.

“Now get lost, before I kick your teeth out, fucking beanpole.” His trecks kicked at the ground absentmindedly for a moment or two, then without any warning raised, sending a fang in Kazu’s direction. A warning. He was done, wasn’t continuing this conversation further. The trick could be easily dodged, by someone with Kazu's speed, but his intention wasn't to hit.

[errandry]

It shouldn't have felt this weird. There was plenty of stuff they didn't tell Ikki—hell, most of it would've worked against them anyway. Self-preservation and all that. It made sense not to fuck with the future—and what would Ikki do, anyway, if he knew? Take Genesis on months early from his chair? Go walking like a prophet, talking madness and treachery until somebody took him down? So he'd find out when he went back. He'd deal. They didn't have to complicate this, being here—and how much was it worth it, anyway, to explain a fucking mess like Takeuchi Sora just to push the extra weight from their own shoulders?

The Fang came as it was meant to—like a warning he felt in his bones, the infinitesimal tremor that was as good as words spoken out loud: your time's up. get the fuck out before this turns into a real hunt. A heartbeat's notice was enough; Kazu spun out of the way without even bothering to vanish. He knew lines, drawn and crossed. There wasn't any real answer he could offer to that anyway.

Aloud, he said, "Yeah, yeah." Spreading the beanie open, Kazu jammed it back over his head again. He twisted away, back towards the City's streets and mazy lights. Over his shoulder, he glanced back once, briefly. "G'night, Agito."

Then he evaporated, leaving neither smoke nor shadow to betray his direction. Getting the last word, after all, probably qualified for a Level 10 Offense with a shark.