Work Text:
As always, the morning sun striking my window awakes me, shining in my eyes and drawing me from my slumber. I set up the apartment so that my bedroom would have the east-facing window for just this reason - it's better and more pleasant than any alarm clock ever designed.
I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face - it's summer again, and the window is open to let the warm, fresh-scented breeze into the room. The shadows flicker across my eyelids as the filmy curtain moves in the wind, and I snuggle a little deeper into the blankets contentedly. No need to get up just yet - Schuldig and Nagi won't be up for hours.
Sighing, I roll over on my back and begin my morning ritual. Relaxing each muscle in my body in turn, I send myself drifting into a trance just as my instructors at the Institute taught me. I can read the future without being in trance, but the visions are much clearer this way.
First things first - I check what has changed since I went to sleep the night before. Most people think that the future is a static thing - I look once, and I know what's going to happen. It's not that simple. The future is an ever-changing ocean of possibilities, ebbing and flowing with the tide of decisions six billion people make every day. Most of them have no effect on my life directly, and I have long since learned to ignore that chaff, sorting through it to find the kernels of knowledge I want.
A few minor changes - Takatori has decided to bring his son Masafumi along with us to the conference this weekend, against my recommendation. I grimace at that, and lose the thread of vision momentarily. Forcing myself to relax again, I pick up the image where I dropped it. Masafumi is insane, but his insanity is controllable and can be manipulated for my own purposes. The main reason I don't want him along is that he was bound to bring one of those female 'bodyguards' of his along - Hell almost certainly, and possibly Neu or Schoen as well. Thank God he at least has the taste to leave Tot behind for conferences like this - while sometimes amusing, her five-year-old mentality can often prove an annoyance. Besides, I want to bring Nagi along on this job, and I don't want him spending more time with her than is strictly necessary. Every time the two of them encounter each other, I get a wave of uneasiness from my powers - something connected to her is going to affect him negatively, but I can't yet see what.
That is the most frustrating aspect of my powers - while they are nearly a hundred percent accurate in the extreme short-term, the accuracy falls off exponentially with each passing day. Beyond the limits of a year, I can see almost nothing voluntarily, though I will occasionally get brief visions of an important or life-threatening event some time in the distant future. There are just too many possible decisions, too many possible paths for the future to follow.
Take Esstet's current plans, for example. I don't know what their overall objective is, or what they hope to accomplish in the long-term. But I do know that whatever it is, it is sending massive waves of tension down through the timeline to me, from almost two years in the future. I could feel the first ripples of it even five years ago, when Esstet first approached me to defect from the Institute and join them. I don't know why their other precognitives haven't twigged to the disaster waiting to happen - perhaps it applies to me, specifically, and so I am getting more warning than they. Whatever the reason, it is clear that if I wish the world to survive as it is, I am going to have to start making plans to deal with it soon.
Speaking of Esstet - or perhaps I mean to say, 'thinking of Esstet' - I catch a flash of something in the near future, centred on them. Concentrating, I am rewarded with a glimpse of a silver-haired, one-eyed man with the look of a fanatic - the vision shows him standing with Schuldig, Nagi and I, facing down four young men in a building corridor. A new teammate, perhaps? Sent to us by Esstet, presumably. This could cause problems; Schuldig, Nagi and I have forged ourselves into a working team, mostly because they both still feel some loyalty to me for 'rescuing' them. The addition of an unknown, with no previous ties to any of us, could upset the delicate balance we've managed to achieve
Ignoring it for the moment, I focus on the other part of the vision. I've seen those young men in visions before, more frequently of late - 'Weiss', they are called, and they will be both a hindrance and a useful tool to us in the months to come. Takatori's brother Shuichi controls them, though they aren't aware of it, and their primary mission is to destroy Takatori Reiji at any cost. A nuisance, that - Esstet still has use for the man, and we have to keep him alive until his usefulness has run out. Once that happens, we can hand him over to Weiss and let them do what they wish to him - a convenient way of keeping our hands clean of the mess.
'Weiss'. What arrogance, to name themselves after an endlessly pure whiteness - their hands are as dirty as ours, though their motives are perhaps more 'moral' by society's standards. It is especially ironic, given that I doubt there is a drop of German blood among the four of them. Perhaps it is time I found a name for our team - 'Schwartz' might be appropriate, as a sort of satiric mockery of their presumption. Perhaps not. Schuldig would at least get a laugh out of it.
Ah, Schuldig. As always my mind returns to you, day after day in my thoughts, night after night in my dreams. I may never know what happened to change our lives so drastically from the path I had planned - your amnesia has shown no signs of lifting in the four years since I rescued you, and probably never will. All I know is that one morning I awoke and performed this same daily ritual, and everything I had previously foreseen was gone. All my plans, all my hopes for the two of us, were vanished, blown away as though they had no more substance than a dream. The boy I knew as Lukas, the boy I trained with at the Institute and who I foresaw would be the one to help me break the chains of control those men had placed on me, was gone; it wasn't until a year later that I found you in Shigeru's harem, bound and broken and changed almost past recognition. I will never forget the shock I felt that day. If not for the flame red hair and cat-green eyes I might never have even suspected it was you - that, and the emotions and hateful thoughts you were leaking through your patchy shields.
The most powerful telepath in the world, perhaps the most powerful in history, reduced to a wealthy pervert's sex toy. And you were barely eighteen - you should have had another year of training at the Institute before you were sent out of the Swiss Alps compound into the world as a field agent. I can only assume that Esstet's systematic destruction or conversion of the Institute's agents resulted in them sending mostly-trained cadets out to replace the lost agents. How that train of events ended with your total loss of memory and control over your powers, I may never find out. I've seen enough of your nightmares, before you learned to keep your shields up when you slept, to know that something monumentally horrible happened, an event that nearly destroyed your mind entirely.
It was so difficult for me to accept that I had lost you. Even though you had no idea who I was, even though my own powers showed me that I had no hope of bringing you back, still I entertained the foolish hope that I could 'win you over' somehow, bring back your memories of our time together so that I could have you at my side as I had originally planned. Oh, I could have forced your mind to recall your past - my own limited telepathic ability combined with your utter inability to shield yourself would have allowed that much. But every time I contemplated doing so, I was struck with a violent vision of the chaos and mayhem that would ensue, ending in either your death, mine, or both. Whatever terrible event it is that your mind is running from, it would be enough to destroy you.
Eventually I gave up on getting you to remember, and just tried searching for a way to win you to my side without those memories. Every morning I spent an hour or more, searching every thread of the future for a way to make it happen. I could easily have ordered you to sleep with me, but in doing so I would have lost you forever. Besides which, the idea was distasteful to me. If I couldn't have you as Lukas, I didn't want you as Schuldig.
Almost as easily I could have won your affection - you were so lost and helpless those first few months, fighting for control of your own mind. I could have implanted the notion of loving me into your mind with my telepathy, or with a little more effort I could even have seduced you without resorting to mental manipulations. But both scenarios ended in anger and dissension between us, as eventually your fickle attention would wander from me. It would have destroyed our team and any hope we had of becoming, at least, friends.
For a while I decided to content myself with that, with your friendship. I found a future that would allow me to guide you into full realization of the potential of your powers, without bringing on that horrible memory you had suppressed. I had you with me again, even if I had to be your 'Master'. I even had hopes of a partnership of sorts, once Takatori was gone and I no longer had to pretend to this BDSM bullshit to keep him off you.
Then the quixotic future shifted once again, with the introduction of a new variable - Nagi. From the first vision that showed me the awakening of his formidable powers, everything I had planned changed. To ignore the potential benefit he presented for our team was folly; to introduce him to the equation spelled disaster for my hopes of a partnership. I saw that no matter what course I took he would become a bone of contention between us, destroying any chance I had with you.
At that point I was forced to make a decision, and I like to think I did the reasonable thing, the mature thing. They say that if you love something, you have to let it go - I let you go that day. The morning of the party that would be my chance to gain control of Nagi, I changed the question I asked daily of my powers. 'What can I do to win him back' became instead, 'What can I do to make him happy?'.
The answer to that was painfully clear, and almost beyond my ability to carry out. I know you think I'm a cold-hearted bastard, incapable of the warmer emotions, but the truth is that I'm simply an expert at hiding my feelings behind my shield. Thank God for that shield! Without it I would be bare to you, and none of my manipulations would have been worth a damn.
It hurt me to ignore Nagi that way, to frighten him so that he would look to you for guidance instead of me. He's such a delicate child, with those wide, injured eyes of his that stare all the way through to your soul. I'm hardly the paternal type, but it would take a colder heart than I possess to treat that boy badly. Yet in some ways I was worse to him than any of his previous Masters.
I sent you away from my side, so that you wouldn't be there to prevent Shigeru from accosting the boy. I stood by and watched, expressionless, as Nagi's eyes pleaded with me to save him while Shigeru groped him mercilessly. I convinced you that I didn't give a damn about what happened to the boy, convinced you that I would happily watch all your hard work at drawing him out go merrily to Hell. You'll never know how much it cost me, how much strength of will it took not to take my gun and blow the God damned bastard's head off for touching the boy.
I walked a delicate line that day. It wouldn't have taken much to convince you to pull that trigger. At the same time, I had to make you mad enough to challenge me, to be willing to fight me for him and for yourself. Had I simply given you your 'freedom', it would have been worthless - Nagi would have continued to see me as his 'Master', and every time Takatori took us to one of those damned parties you would have been treated just as if you were still my slave. This was the only way I could find to make you truly free, to give you the right to protect Nagi, to impress upon Takatori just HOW bad an idea it would be for him to try to accost you or the boy.
You came through with flying colours, just as I knew you would. I ruined any chance I ever had of being anything but your 'leader', but I set the stage for the events that would lead to your happiness with Nagi. And you will never know just how much it cost me.
Every day I try to convince myself to get over you. We were hardly more than children when we knew each other, I tell myself. You were barely fourteen, I was almost nineteen. We've both changed so much since then! You were a crush, a first love, and that more platonic than sexual. Yes, surely - which is why I dream of you endlessly, dream of the lost chances and possibilities. As a teenager and a young man, I always scoffed at the idea of 'soul mates', of two people destined to be together. I stopped laughing the day I found you again, the day those emerald eyes of yours pierced me through to my soul and made my heart stop in my chest for an endless moment.
It sounds so trite, like one of those awful dime store romances. If you ever caught me thinking like that, you'd laugh for a week straight. I disgust myself, being so ridiculously sappy. It's not like me at all - perhaps I should be grateful we never had a chance together, if you're going to affect me this way. And you think you're in danger of going soft!
Focus, Brad, focus. Brad... you still haven't figured out why I hate it so much when you call me that. Somehow it's easier for me, having you call me Crawford - you never called me that at the Institute, because none of us were supposed to know our last names. Hearing you call me Brad, as you used to - it hurts, in its own way, as a reminder of what was lost. Your voice has changed since then, deepened further and gained a rough, nasal edge from abuse; but just hearing you say that one word, my name, can take me back years to the days when we were together and had the whole world laid out before us, ours for the taking.
The world is still there, still ours for the taking, though not in the manner I had originally predicted. Somehow it seems emptier now, without you to truly share it with.
Enough of the 'pity-fest', as you would call it in your colourful language. I've had enough angst for the day, it's time to get up and face reality. I let myself float up from the depths of the trance, bid my powers to lay quiescent until they choose to confront me with a vision. I double-check to ensure my shield is in place, and that nothing is leaking through for you to pounce upon with your endless curiosity about my thoughts. I open my eyes to the sunlight, basking in the warmth for a moment longer before rising from my bed.
I hope you and Nagi are happy together, my friend. I'll do everything I can to ensure it, I promise you, though you may hate me for what I do. Lukas or Schuldig, I will always love you.