THIS I PROMISE

"Are you sure you can't stay a little longer, Maki?"

Maki wheeled around on her heel, turning back to Shuichi standing in his doorway. The light and warmth from within were already fading from her body as the cold wind carried it away down the hallway. She pulled the two halves of her jacket together before zipping it up to her neck.

"Yes. Unfortunately, there's still a lot more…. Work I need to attend to."

There was a twinge, just the subtlest flavoring of pained regret and apprehension in her voice. But she quickly continued on, as if nothing were amiss. She knew that Shuichi could probably see past the veil she tried to put up. Not only was he incredibly sharp and perceptive, but ever since their time together with everyone back then, she had never been as capable of hiding her emotions. At least, no where near as well as she once could. So instead, she opted to smile. And it was not pained or forced, it was sincere and genuine, "Thank you for the tea, Shuichi. It was really good. And… it was also really nice spending time with you."

She toyed with one of her mile-long twin tails and looked toward the ground, "We've never really… 'hung out' since, back then. I had forgotten how nice it could be to just relax and talk with friends." A tiny gleam sparked in Shuichi's eyes.

"I thought so too. Honestly, I don't really know why we haven't done it sooner."

"I guess we both have just been pretty busy…" Shuichi bit his lip and snorted softly.

"Yeah, I guess we have." He looked up and regarded Maki for a moment. As the chilled wind swept her twin tails up into streamers and she looked down with an expression that he couldn't quite make out, but he knew she was trying to hide. It really had been so long. Before tonight, the last time they had been able to just be together with one another was…

Flashes of a quaint scene in the middle of the night. Soft grass beneath their hands. Smiles on their faces. A small girl with a witch's hat perched upon her head slumped on the ground. Maki smiling, Shuichi laughing. A pretty girl with glasses…

A dull pang coursed through his chest at the memory. The last time they had been together was also the last time they had been held within the confines of that accursed academy. Three years had now passed since their time there. A time spent in the company of anxiety, fear, suspicion, betrayal, and despair. Had it really been so long ago?

To the two Ultimates, the memories never seemed to lose their vividness or potency. They could still recall all of it, as if it had happened merely a week ago. And while there had no doubt been many bright moments that peppered their time there, as well as many things that had been given to them, they were outweighed by those that were stolen from them. Friendships, loves, innocence, and futures. It had all been stripped away like flesh from the bone of a predator's carnal hunger. Stripped until the three of them had only been left with each other.

They were all they had left of the good that came out of that school. All they had to hang onto through the dark nights and trying days. As he reminisced, his vision getting lost in Maki, Shuichi unwittingly released words that had been held back behind his teeth, without even considering what he was saying, "You're welcome here whenever you want, you know."

Maki blinked before looking back up to Shuichi. A dull glow emanating from somewhere deep within her, illuminating her eyes, "What?" The awareness in Shuichi's eyes seem to instantaneously snap back as he comprehended what he had just said. A gentle dusting of rose colored his face as he reached up unconsciously to scratch at his scalp.

"I- I mean, well… you know if you ever wanted to stop by and come in again, y- you can if you want. You know, I mean, not every single time we meet has to be about business. Sometimes, maybe it would be nice to just… be friends again." Shuichi gazed down at the floor, unable or unwilling to meet Maki's gaze that he could feel spotlighting him.

A gentle warmth began to simmer in the depths of her core. Something akin to… anticipation. A feeling of looking forward to things that have yet to come. Maki can't remember the last time she could ever recall feeling even an inkling of this feeling. There had never been anything in her life to look forward to. Not a day, not an event, not a person. Her world was darkness, blood, and death. Only the sickest of psychopaths could ever find any reason to be excited about anything in this life she lived.

Now though, Shuichi was opening a window. A window where she could sit in the light that shined from within. Escaping through that window, as things stood now, was not possible. Nothing resembling escape was anywhere close to being in view. But… if she could just come and let the light shine upon her, let it chase the darkness away, if only for a little while… that might just make all the difference in the world one day.

The unfamiliar feeling began welling up. Maki turned away from Shuichi in order to hide her discomfort. There was a forceful yet dull pounding in her chest, as if a battering ram trying to break through a door barricaded by cotton and foam. Shuichi tensed, sensing that he might have overstepped his bounds. But as he cast his eyes downwards to lament his awkward blunder, he heard the faint notes of Maki's voice carried to him by the wind, "I think…. I would like that."

Shuichi's eyes snapped back, a spark of light twinkling for a brief moment. He also could feel a drumming in his chest, and the drummer was the notion of not feeling alone anymore. Though they had been together many times, they had never truly connected again. Not like they had back at the academy. It was hilarious, actually, just how simple it was to make this happen. A few words from both of them was all it took. The weight of their loneliness suddenly felt just a tiny bit lighter, and it was both exhilarating and frightening.

"I'll see you soon, Shuichi," And with that, the girl with the chestnut hair departed down the hall, never looking back at the young detective. For whatever reason, one that Maki could not hope to fathom at this moment, she couldn't bring herself to turn back to him. She placed a hand to her chest, feeling the uncomfortable thumping continue it's march.

Back into the night, into the darkness. Maki trudged down the sidewalk, hands in her coat pockets, one clutching the Glock resting within. Downtown, in the dead of night, was no place for the weak, for those that live their lives in the sun. The windows of the buildings towering high above Maki's head were dark. Maki continued on, passing beneath another darkened streetlight. Only the very few that had not yet been shot out illuminated the streets, likes dots on a paper that needed connecting. They were never fixed, and they never would be. The city government had "better" things to spend tax money on than the infrastructure of a viper pit nobody cared about and nobody upstanding would ever go to.

The storefronts were dead. Empty, dark, many of their display windows smashed open. The light and warmth of Shuichi and his apartment were long gone, miles away where the monsters could never reach him. A lone, howling wind blew threw the valley of buildings, sending Maki's tendrils aflutter. She zipped jacket up all the way to the top and squared her shoulders. Her grip on her gun tightened.

She could feel them.

Their eyes.

Watching her.

Not a single window appeared to be anything else than a blackened hole into nowhere. But just behind the veil of that darkness, she knew they were there. She could hear them. Their shuffling feet, the sound of chains dragged along the floor, the sharp two-toned snap of a handgun's slide springing into action. Maki has walked these streets before. The pavement looks gray; the red had faded from it long ago. It always does. This was no place for good people. Only the lowest scum ever found themselves washed up here.

And only the worst of them were ever able to survive.

Suddenly, the sound of a shoe sliding over pavement came from the entrance to the alley she had just passed. She kept walking. The sound of a long, slow exhale came from across the street. She kept walking. The sound of the cap of a flask being slowly screwed back into place from the alley ahead of her. She stopped.

She knew they were there. She knew they knew they were there. And she was quite ready to hurry and get this over with. Then footsteps, footsteps not concerned with hiding their presence. Then a rough voice came from ahead of her, "Well look who it is." A man, in roughly his late 20s, wearing a beanie over his long, scraggly blond hair and patch over his right eye, appeared from the void, "Haven't seen you around for quite some time. Where'd ya run off to? We really missed ya, you know."

Maki saw movement in her peripheral from across the street. She heard footsteps creeping up on her from behind. She did not move, nor blink. She held her gaze with the man in front of her, and said nothing.

"Hey, ya hear me? I said something to you. This is where you say something back," He produced a switchblade from his jacket pocket and brandished it as if ready for a duel. The distance between the man across the street, the man behind her, and herself was shrinking. Maki thumbed the safety of her own piece in her pocket.

"I don't know you, and I have no business with you. And if you want to walk away from this alive, I'd suggest you do it now." She could see a tick go off in the man's face.

"Excuse me...?" the man began chuckling from deep in his throat. It was low, but choked, "I'm sorry, I think I misheard you. You better hope I did, sweetie. Otherwise, I'm going to become very, very agitated. And when I get agitated, things just kind of tend to… happen, if ya know what I'm saying."

"I know exactly what you're saying. And what I'm saying is that this is the last chance I'm going to give you; get out of my way." Flame flashed within the man's eyes, as his barely controlled composure instantly fell like a house of cards.

"NOW!" The sudden exclamation caught Maki off guard for one second. The very next second, she saw something drop past her eyes before something coarse and long constricted around her throat. Suddenly, she felt her feet leave the world as she was pulled back by her neck. She landed squarely on her back. A smacking pain erupted from where she fell. The wind had been knocked from her body, she couldn't even vocalize the pain. Before she could recover, she felt herself being dragged backwards across the cement. She clutched at what she now knew was a noose choking her. Before it could tighten completely around her throat, she jammed her fingers between her neck and the rope and pulled with all the strength she had in her.

She was dragged further back, the coarse pavement scraping across her jacket. She kicked, desperate to catch some purchase on the ground. Suddenly, the eyepatch man came down upon her, straddling her thighs, "Yeah, ya like that, ya little bitch? Not so mouthy now, are ya?" He reeled his arm back before swinging it across Maki's face, slapping her with the back of his hand. It was all she could do to keep the noose from tightening more than it already had.

"Remember me now, huh?" he grilled as he brought his hand back to smack her other cheek with his open palm, before grabbing her jaw in his hand, forcing her to come face to face with him, "I'm the guy whose life you fucked when ya took out my biggest customer two months back, thanks to you icing that Kuzuryu fuck! I got people I need to get that money to, and then you came in and fucked everything sideways!"

Maki's eyes suddenly came into contact with the man's gaze as he ripped away his patch, revealing a scarred and disfigured crater where his eye should be, "Ya see this? This is what happens when my people don't get their money! Yeah, not too pretty, is it bitch!" Another knuckled backhand slap across Maki's mouth cut her lip on one of her teeth. Her mouth filled crimson iron, staining between her teeth, before she once again felt a hand clamp her jaw in place.

"Now it's high time for me to return the favor." he said as he engaged his knife, causing the thin blade to pop up into place. He brought the edge of the blade towards her eye, holding it no more than an inch away as he began making slicing motions across her eyeball. Maki didn't blink as the tip of the blade was brought down, pointed directly at her pupil. The point grew ever closer, engulfing her field of vision. Then, the knife was taken away.

In it's place, however, Maki felt the sensation of a hand running up the side of her hips and her waist, "Although..." Maki watched as the one-eyed man took the zipper of her coat between his fingers and pulled it down, exposing her abdomen. Then the sickening feeling of that same hand diving beneath her shirt and caressing her stomach, "It'd be a waste to to not have my fill before you become 'damaged goods'."

Maki, still fighting the taut rope that was all but lynching her at the moment, watched as the man straddling her lifted her shirt, exposing her bra, "Might as well put that cute face of yours to good use before I carve ya up like a fucking jack-o-lantern," he roughly caressed his thumb across her lips as he bit his own.

"What do ya say, guys? Should we have a little fun with her before we do the deed?" His two goons, who had yet to say a word throughout the entire scene, suddenly came to life in a raucous duet of frat-boy whooping and affirmations, to which the one-eyed man chuckled in return.

"Alright, that's what I like to hear!" he raised himself onto his knees as he began unlatching the belt around his waist, "Make sure ya hold her good and tight," he instructed to Maki's hangman. She felt the tautness of the rope stiffen at the instruction. The moment the buzz of the man's zipper hit Maki's ears, all feeling faded from the world. Any senses that anchored her to this plane of existence faded into a dulled, almost tranquilizing state of being. She felt as if she were not herself, but simply a spectator from within another person. Her body felt light, like a wooden puppet tethered to it's strings. This feeling… a feeling of cold detachment, of objectivity removed from the current situation, the feeling of Maki Harukawa disappearing from this world for a moment, took over, and the Ultimate Assassin's body sprung to life.

As the man began to pull down the waistband of his pants and boxers, the assassin risked freeing one of her hands from their death grip on the noose to reach back and grasp the line between her and the man restraining her. She pulled hard on the rope, causing her to slide backwards between the one-eyed man's knees. She quickly tucked her knees close to her chest before wrapping her legs around his midsection and clamping down with the grip of a vice.

Immediately, she rolled her body to the side, like a crocodile that had captured it's prey in it's powerful jaws. The one-eyed man was ripped from his position of cocky dominance to one of bewildered submissiveness, now being the one beneath the assassin's weight. Without missing a beat, she reared her right leg back at a 90 degree angle before swinging it down with the force of a baseball bat, her knee making a solid connection with his groin.

The one-eyed man roared in agonized pain, the clattering of his knife sparked between his shouts as he clamped his legs together and cupped the assaulted area of his anatomy in a reflexive move to both protect and coddle his damaged pride, "YOU FUCKING CUNT! FUCK! SHIT!" His wails and cries reverberated up and down the open street they occupied, bouncing off the faces of the buildings lining both sides. Suddenly, the man holding her noose, caught off guard by the sudden burst of action, felt himself stumble backwards.

The rope that had kept him connected to the girl, kept him in control of her, suddenly went slack. The sudden excess of slack sent him tumbling backward onto his back before flailing to pick himself up in order to counter whatever she had coming next. The last thing he saw was a black blade hurdling directly towards him before everything went black and quiet. The assassin's combat knife sailed strong and true, lodging itself directly in the middle of the man's forehead with a sickening squelching of flesh and snapping of bone.

The man across the street, who had jumped into action the moment his boss' howls of pain touched his ears, came at her with a spiked bat. Unfortunately, for him, he barely had time to cross the dividing line of the street before he felt tiny pieces of lead cut through him faster than the speed of sound. Three loud pops; one in the gut, the chest, and the head, cracked like rapid strikes of thunder across the dark, barren street. Before the last shot's echoing reverberations could even end, the sound of a dull thud as the man's body crumpled to the floor in a bloodied heap reached the assassin's ears over the continued yowling of the man still writhing beneath her.

She tugged on the noose still wrapped around her neck, opening it and freeing herself from it's grasp. Then, the excruciating shrieks suddenly came to an end.

The assassin with the chestnut hair pulled back on the tail of the noose, which now found itself constricting the one-eyed man's throat rather than her own. As she pulled, she used her other hand to grip the coils of the noose and push it deeper and deeper into his Adam's apple. Desperate chokes and gags were all that permeated the still air of the silent night around them. Pitch blackness, and only choking and dying breaths to console it.

The man's face began to turn a horrifying shade of purple. Not quite red, but not quite blue. His eyes bugged out and his tongue stood stiff in his mouth. His hands flailed desperately to pry her own from the rope around his neck, but it was to no avail. Her grip was steel and it would not yield. She brought her face down close to his. Her darkened, crimson eyes held the icy fire within them that promised all the agonies and torment of Hades, and fixated them all onto the pathetic creature beneath them. Then, she spoke, low and dangerous.

"I want you to look into my eyes. Look at me, and die knowing that you could have walked away from this. You could have lived to see the sun rise on another pitiful day of your pitiful life. But now, because of your stupidity, you'll never see the light of day again. And the last thing you get to see are the eyes of the girl you could have left alone. A girl who had actually been having a decent night for the first time in a long while. Whose night you completely and utterly fucked up," she punctuated those last words with a forceful push of the noose further into the man's throat.

His eye had begun rolling into the back of his head and his flailing became more and more subdued, like the desperate, last ditch flails of a dying fish to flop itself back into water before it drowns in the air. The assassin's voice, so level before, now began to waver and break, "It's because of people like you that I'm like this. Because of you, and all the scum just like you, this is what my life had to become. It's your fault…

your fault…

You're fault!…

YOU'RE FAULT!"

With each subsequent iteration, the noose constricted tighter and tighter. It was a miracle the rope did not simply decapitate the man, at that point. The choking had silenced, the flailing had stopped, and an empty eye gazed up at the dark, starless sky.

Maki panted heavily, her curtain bangs hung low over her eyes. The weight of it all nearly too much for her to hold up any more. Pants, somewhere between gasps and sobbing, was all the music the night in this forsaken pit of town offered. No crickets chirped here, no gentle whooshing of passing cars, only the sounds of death, anger, loneliness, and despair. Her panting slowly subsided. She straightened up, away from the face of her newest victim. She unclenched her fists from around the rope, her fingers stiff and slow to flexing.

Maki rose above her would-be assailant. Stepping over him, she made her way to the corpse that once belonged to the man who had held her captive, her bangs still curtaining her sight from the horrors that surrounded her at the moment. She bent down above the goon's head and clenched her fist around the handle of her knife that had buried itself about 2 ½ inches into his skull. She pulled the blade from the head of the carcass and used it's shirt to wipe off the blood.

Sheathing her knife where it belonged, she took a moment to look down at herself. Her exposed shirt still caught above her bra. She pulled it down before zipping her jacket back up and turning heel around in the direction she had originally been heading. She left the three bodies lying where they lay. Nobody would care. In fact…

After she had put decent distance between her and the scene, she could hear the shuffling feet of scavengers. Vultures, come to pick off anything of value they could find after the lioness' kill. Maki kept walking. She did not look back and her mind was already erecting a wall around what had just transpired... the way it always did. As she walked, she was irritated to find an obstructive lump lodged in her throat. It made her breathing difficult. She hugged her elbows, telling herself it was because of the cold. She never stopped moving forward. Never stopped walking. There was no where else for her to go other than deeper and deeper into the abyss that she could not escape, no matter how hard she tried.

She really missed the tea at Shuichi's apartment.

A/N: I am so sorry updates have been slow, everyone. As some of you may know, I have another story I'm writing alongside this one, "My Favorite Melody". If you want something a little more fluffy than this and are down for some Saikamatsu, please give it a shot. On top of that, I'm also writing more of my own original story that I intend to get published one day as an actual novel. Tack on full time employment and trying to maintain a somewhat regular workout schedule, and I've gotten pretty busy as of late.

Anyway, I'd say more, but it's literally past 2:30AM here and I just wanna post this and head to sleep. Please comment, tell me what you like and what you didn't. Follow me on twitter if you want to know what I'm up to and to get intermittent story updates. Link to is in my profile. Alright thanks guys. Peace.