Monday 1.5 Afterparty

[genuinelie.livejournal.com]

It had been easy enough for Ran to spend the day ignoring his teammates in the shop, the flow of customers constant and pushy enough to make his silence toward them natural.

He wasn't upset with any of them for the day before. If anything, he was mad at himself for the way he had handled it. He shouldn't have had to rely on them. It shouldn't have mattered what they had done - he should have been able to have dealt with the Kritiker agent on his own.

He couldn't change it. He could only be sure he'd be prepared for the next time.

He had missed Aya-chan in the morning. He knew Omi walked her to school, and he trusted his younger teammate with that, but he rarely missed seeing her off without telling her first. He hoped she would not feel neglected because of it.

Maybe she was relieved.

It was because of Kudoh. And that brought him to what kept circling in his ears since that morning. You only care if we are able to function on missions. Or whatever the man had said.

He couldn't get Yohji's words out of his head.

What did it matter? What did it matter to any of them? They hadn't chosen to work with each other. Or maybe they had, but he hadn't. He had just made a stupid mistake and had ended up on Yohji's bed...

The last of the customers trailed out and Ran slammed the door shut, flipping the sign to close.

It was as if it were Yohji's fate to be the bane of his existence.

He had ended up on Yohji's bed, and there Yohji was, mocking him with it that morning. Sprawled like a cat, rumpled shirt pushed up to show too much skin like his bed was a place he belonged...situation reversed.

Ran left the shop without looking at his teammates.

How dare he. He did care what happened to his teammates outisde of missions. He would be inhuman if he didn't. He lived with them, worked with them, killed with them. In some ways it was a more intimate situation than any relationship a normal person could have.

Was that what Yohji really saw him as, then? Inhuman?

Perhaps in many ways, Aya had been.

Ran, of course, was not any different. He had hoped once that returning his sister's name to her would also return who he had been, like a mask falling away.

It was a naive thought.

But Yohji was wrong. Perhaps he was concerned foremost with his teammate's abilities to do their jobs, but that was also what he needed to do as their friend. When they couldn't do their jobs was when it would be apparent that this life had destroyed them.

He needed to get out of the Koneko and away from this borrowed life, if only for a little while.

He went to his sister's room and knocked.