until the river runs red

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When he was fourteen, a libertine doctor had turned to him casually, almost tenderly, and advised him to cover his ears.

Before him, two men clutched HK21Es to their chests, spraying the field in the manner Bianchi watered her pale pink azaleas—indiscriminately and excessively. The guy on the right had his hair slicked back, but it was thinned, like he'd ran a rake through it, leaving ridges in-between. His partner was a head shorter, and several times thinner. Didn't even bother to aim low like you're supposed to—just sprayed 'em like shrieking girls chasing one another with hoses at a summer barbeque. He heard the heavy chuck chuck of magazines being handloaded and fumbled with as one guy dropped his and swore. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," he muttered, shaking on his knees and groping underneath the car belly for his lifeline. All around, spent brass shells popped out like sizzling firecrackers, pinging hollow and high-pitched as they glanced off the rough road below.

"Come on, man, back me up here!"

"Shit—can't find it—"

"For fuck's sake, when are they going to let up?"

"Boss' orders. Just keep firing. Suckers gotta die sooner or later."

"Yeah, well, we might turn out to be mighty fine suckers too if you don't pick your ass up."

The men moved with a forced sort of blurry panic, the kind that admits its fumbling fear by trying not to. One misstep made the difference between a veteran and an epitaph.

The two-seater black Cadillac had been beautiful once, the boy could tell. His father drove an older model. Briefly, Gokudera superimposed the man in the driver's seat, lurching around under fire like a tortured crash test dummy. He blinked and his father vanished, replaced by broken windows and broken men. The car was wasted. What remained was a sorry piece of shit that, for all its shine and seduction, would blow out like a holey chunk of cheese at the slightest abuse.

He recalled the vague, dark discomfort of watching something get shot to hell without response or resistance.

Boom.

The red's bright and the yellow's nauseating. They're done for.

Smoke rose, smothering the silence.

"Why didn't you stop them?"

Shamal stamped out a cigarette with impeccably maintained black oxfords. "You wanna die?"

The question had blindsided him at the time. "N-No, but..." Someone's got to be the fixer; we can't all be fucking problems.

"There you have it." The man pushed off the crumbling brick wall and signaled for him to follow. "Come on, we'd better get home. Creepy things out here at night."

In the coming years, the boy would learn to associate his mentor with the aforementioned "creepy things."

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He sat idly in a black Cadillac with mounting paranoia (and nothing to warrant it) as the rain drummed cantankerous beats on the roof, compressing all the stress in the world and shoving it down on him like a piston in a gas cylinder, closing in. Like a typewriter clicking and cackling with mad, bubbling delight.

Like brass shells bouncing off the ground.

Toying with an unlit dynamite between two fingers, he finally forced out a strangled sound and shoved the door open. The door hadn't resisted as much as he'd prepared for, and the force propelled him outwards in a less-than-graceful stumble. The deafening roar lessened to a rhythmic static as he stood there with nothing to do but stand.

It was an odd time of day—five forty-three PM. In the span of an hour the sky would shed dozens of hues and settle for night. A sodium-vapor lamp flickered on, and his legs started towards the bar. A frequent drunk tottered out early, led by the ear and wincing in a mixture of pain and self-loathing. The woman did not seem pleased, but neither did she seem spiteful. Her lips were pursed and her eyes glassy. Maybe they'd scream it out later and make up and fall back into the same routine the next day. But she'd cared enough to drag him out, hadn't she? Poor guy. Her attention would only remind him of how much he didn't deserve her.

He leaned against the sordid establishment and lit a cigarette.

"You wanna die?"

It tasted like bitterness so he put it out, crushing the stub in the ash tray. The sky rumbled and it seemed to him an inconsolable anger, a tantrum in the making. The shower blurred the edges of the buildings and cars in the street, lending an impressionist air to the evening. Greyish purples and slick navy blues and glowing lights.

Sure, why not?

But it was easy to yearn for whatever flashed like a neon exit sign. Sometimes death was a door, but mostly it was leaking bits of yourself onto the ground because your enemy had an enemy, too.

Five thirty, she had said. Give or take his usual game of testing her patience, he'd be there at five fifty-seven. (He knew she preferred waiting for round intervals, tens and twenties. Any different and she'd get fidgety. Mind would play tricks on her and all that. He chalked it up to her idealism. Even numbers should be nice.)

"Hey."

Damn you.

He hadn't said it. He'd only exhaled. But were his exhales to speak, they'd damn her a thousand times over.

"Why?"

"Why what?" She cocked her head to a side, glancing at him with a simple familiarity that implied a habit of glancing at him. She could recite every scar on his face and torso chronologically—not because he had shown her, or anyone, but because she had either witnessed it or hovered nearby as Bianchi treated the wound. She hated seeing him on the operation table, like some study of ravaged flesh, a blistered corpse with no fight left. Ryohei expended his energy on the battlefront, so traditional practice had to suffice. She would stand there anyway, with bated breath, waiting for the first blink, for his sage irises to find her.

She knew, of course, that there would come a day of no blinking. But never mind that now.

He sighed, which was tantamount to admitting everything he could not. "Do you consider yourself a good person?"

"Mmm... more like a work in progress."

"Right. And being so progressive and good," (her gaze narrowed to a glare at the oblique accusation wrapped in a bow), "you wouldn't want to unnecessarily burden anyone, would you?"

"Objection. Leading question."

He made an effort not to roll his eyes. In the end he permitted the small honesty; if he could not claim anything else, he would grant himself these gestures, these minute reactions.

"Overruled."

She sighed in response, but he could discern nothing from it. A raindrop arced down the tip of her nose. "I wouldn't. What's your point? You're not one to beat around the bush."

He breathed in deeply, but couldn't tell that he had; his muscles had begun to lose feeling in the cold. His diaphragm contracted tightly nonetheless. "Just quit it. Whatever psychological release you get from this, it's not worth it. I don't need it. You don't need it."

She thought it best not to point out that addiction was reason enough for need. Hazelnut eyes flickered up to his, and she paused, waiting for his tormented statement of the obvious.

"Here's how it works: either I'll die on some mission and you'll have to spit on my grave in lieu of a repartee, or you'll die when I'm not around—or worse—when I am, and I won't even be able to spit on your grave because I hate half-assed arguments, and you wouldn't be able to pitch your two cents."

Leaning in, she articulated crisply, "Can't say I'm fond of half-assed arguments, either."

His brows drew together in disbelief before angling down sharply as he averted his gaze. "I'm serious. I can handle my fucking mess of a life, but you're too much."

If she had been more expedient, he wouldn't have needed to warn her. If she had been of the never-look-back variety, he would've cut himself loose long ago. He had likened her to an anchor at first, drunk on dreams and heavy to carry. But she was nothing of the sort; if anything, she was a lighthouse, the stuff of fucking nursery rhymes.

He would wear her out, eventually. He'd search for a speck of light in the night unconsciously, not knowing what it cost her to keep lit. There was nothing professional about their relationship. He respected her space, but only because he expected the same from her. Words, however, were scissor-sharp and meant to stab the gut. Nothing was off-limits—the more furious the exchange, the more alive he felt. That he'd developed a guilty conscience now was somehow laughable.

She snorted unsympathetically. "You really want a ceasefire? Hard to believe, coming from someone so trigger-happy." At his scowl, Haru snapped, "It's old news, okay? You're going to die with regrets. I'm going to die with regrets. Get over it." The shoddy café roof did little to shield them, and the downpour matted the smooth strands framing her face into swirls on her cheeks. She involuntarily gasped as a few weighty drops shimmied down the back of her neck, cresting over the notches of her spine.

He shook his head, growling. "Shut up. Just shut up. You still don't get it." He advanced suddenly, pushing past her bubble and halting just short of a collision.

"There are things you can't change. Accept that."

She jutted her chin out, which brought her lips a mere centimeter from his. "And if I won't?"

"Then fight your battles in vain," he muttered, expecting her to shatter, to blame him, to purge her frustration. He drew back cautiously, and she sucked in a tremulous breath through her teeth, preserving the remnant of his last syllable, letting the gruff tone seep through her veins and set her spine a little stiffer. How odd, that his cold demeanor warmed her all the same, thawing the ice in their discourse.

Moments passed and they kept breathing and it kept raining.

She considered him through a squint, then grasped his chin, tugging his jaded gaze onto her. "I'm not fighting you. You need to realize that."

He felt the irrational desire to wipe the wet strands off of her face.

"Damn you," he spat instead.

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"Something wrong, kid?"

"I'm not a kid anymore."

"No?" The doctor smiled playfully, and the storm guardian resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He felt his insides churn as he refrained from smoking in front of his previous mentor. It was an acknowledgement he wasn't ready to impart. "You tried to wipe your bloody hands on your shirt in the last ambush. You're still a kid."

"Don't fuck with me, Shamal," he glowered.

"Works fine with the ladies," Shamal grinned lewdly before turning to the bartender and ordering another.

"It's on the house," the barkeep replied with a wave, and Gokudera inwardly suspected they were trying to ply the philanderer into leaving a bigger tip. The last time he visited, the doctor had passed out on the counter dribbling drool and crumpled hundred dollar bills out of his pockets from a fresh robbery.

The former student massaged his temples. "You're pathetic."

"So are you."

He froze, glancing up at the older man. The doctor's cajoling tone had flattened into something unusually grim.

"If a woman like her gave me half the time of day she gives you, I'd be booked for life."

"We're not discussing this," he warned, hackles rising. "Your trashy lectures on love spin everything into a damn soap opera, and that's not how it works."

"Sounds like you know all about how it works." Shamal nodded to himself, chugged the beer, then laughed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

"Gimme a break. You don't know the first thing about how it works."

"My father," he started, gritting his teeth, "loved my mother. Loved her with the fucking love that dons a cape and pretends it conquers all. But he was vile and disgusting and smooth. And look where that love got her. He ruined her. Killed her reputation, her career, and found her dead in a ditch somewhere."

The obnoxious assassin couldn't hold his liquor, but few could tell his intoxicated face from his sober one. He possessed an omnipresent sense of drollery that held no grudges and ribbed everything sacred. "If it's any consolation, you're hardly smooth. Sure, you're not a great catch, but hey—some prefer their men uncouth."

The silver-haired man dashed the doctor's bottle to the ground, watching it splinter into pieces. "You're missing the point. Just forget it."

He rose, paid the tab, and left without looking back.

Shamal watched him go, smiling softly.

"Lucky bastard."

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He turned and tossed in his sleep before grunting and glaring at the ceiling. This lasted for another hour before he was too fatigued to continue.

Adhering to logic, he was only destructive until it became inefficient.

When he awoke, the base was empty. It wasn't really; no one had left, but it was empty all the same. For no reason at all, he stared at his pillow distrustfully then threw it across the room. A CD case occupied the space that should have been rumpled bedding and nothing else. He reached for it gingerly, removing the disk inside. It was unlabeled. Ever the empiricist, he rummaged around in his closet, and procured an outdated CD player.

Gokudera fiddled around with the controls, then sat back, the bed springs creaking as he did so.

Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3.

A slow fog, an unflappable longing, a nuanced wind, a buoyed explorer adrift in the sea.

He'd pinned his dreams on performing the piece when he was eight.

How the hell had she known?

He fisted his sheets and mourned for the ache he'd murder before it split him in two.

Forty-two minutes later, he rose to remove the disk.

"Happy birthday."

Her voice. Recorded. He could see her insufferable smile as she said it.

She was trying to kill him. There was no other explanation. He would not let her ruin him, let himself ruin her.

But he would revisit the concerto night after night, until it bore scratches from fits of frustration and unshakeable guilt. At the first sound glitch, he stopped listening altogether.

He had loved it.

He had ruined it.

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She slid a manila envelope under his door, then whirled around at a sudden hiss.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"It's a different one. Figured you'd gotten tired of the first, since I haven't heard it for while..."

The storm guardian pinned her against the wall, long fingers forming manacles around her wrists. "Can't you take a fucking hint?" He had an air of taut tenacity about him; a constant threat to snap like a rubber band that left a red welt on your skin when stretched too far.

Eying her bandaged shoulder, his grip slackened. He didn't ask.

Haru twisted free, surprised he had relented. "I would ask you the same, but I already know the answer."

He avoided touching the disk for fear of leaving fingerprints. He avoided touching her for fear of wanting to, but she'd been scratched anyway.

And he had not ruined her.

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