Chapter Text
Shinichi couldn’t believe what he’d done. He stared in horror at the third finger on his left hand—or more like, at the brutal wire sticking out from under his fingernail.
He’d been doing an experiment in the library, suspending weights on a fulcrum by sharp, stiff wire. Twisting the loop to raise the left one just a few millimeters higher, he’d looked away for a second—just one second to gauge the relative heights. And in that second, the wire snapped and one half-inch piece had jammed up under his fingernail. Just looking at it made him feel sick. Except for one hot flash of pain, it didn’t hurt yet, but he had a feeling that was about to change in a big way.
He had to find Rei and Akai before he passed out. Or screamed.
Shinichi stumbled out of the library, squeezing around the base of that finger as hard as he could. His head felt foggy, and there was a weird taste in the back of his mouth, like the acidic tang of bile he got when he was about to throw up. Which could easily happen, if he looked down again.
He could hear Rei and Akai in the kitchen up ahead—Rei berating Akai for whatever he’d done to the cream stew, and Akai’s low chuckle as he bent over Rei’s shoulder, stealing a bite off the wooden spoon.
Shinichi paused in the doorway, swallowing hard.
“Rei?”
Rei turned. Then Shinichi watched all of the blood drain out of his face as he dropped the wooden spoon, clanging onto the pan on the stovetop and splattering cream stew all over his dark sweater. “Shinichi,” Rei gasped. But he wasn’t running for him, like he usually did. He was frozen next to the stove, gripping the edge of the counter like his knees were about to go out. Shinichi had one second to wonder why—then Akai crossed the room in two strides and grabbed him up, his back to Rei as he pressed Shinichi into his shoulder.
“I’ve got him, Rei. Come on, kid—let’s get that taken care of.”
Shinichi blinked. Akai never picked him up much—never at home, unless it was really dire. He had the feeling he’d missed something big. But the pain was coming back, and he didn’t have the brain cells to worry about it.
“Where are we going?” he asked as Akai passed the front bedroom, their makeshift infirmary.
Akai checked they were out of earshot before he answered, “Garage. We’re going to need some pliers.”
*
Akai braced Shinichi on the hood of the Mustang and knelt in front of him, holding his hand steady as he edged the needle-nose pliers under the crescent of the nail. He had a lot of practice removing sharp objects from under fingernails. But it felt different, doing it on such a small one.
The garage smelled like exhaust and antifreeze, Rei’s expensive brand of engine putty and the metallic reek of the spare canisters of gasoline in the corner. It’d never bothered Akai, but he wondered if it bothered Shinichi. He looked a little green. That’s why Akai had put him on the car. If Shinichi passed out, he’d just land on the hood instead of cracking his head open on the dirty concrete.
“Is it bad? It’s not that bad. Is it really bad?” Shinichi asked, the words coming a little too fast.
“It’ll be okay. Deep breath,” Akai said. Shinichi flinched as he pulled. The wire came out clean with the pliers—but Akai could see the jagged red line where it had cut right through the tender skin under Shinichi’s nail. He’d feel that for a while.
Shinichi winced as Akai wiped away the tiny crust of blood, then smeared a little Vaseline on his fingertip. “Ow.”
“Keep it above the level of your heart. It’ll help with the swelling.” Akai pulled that little hand up, resting it carefully on Shinichi’s opposite shoulder. “Not much else we can do for it, except painkillers.”
“I’m on board with painkillers,” Shinichi muttered. He kept looking away, then back, then away again as Akai bandaged his tiny finger with a loose strip of gauze.
Akai shook his head. “How’d this happen, kid?”
The boy grimaced. “It was this…experiment I was doing in the library. It was just weights, but the wire snapped, and…”
Akai knew it helped Shinichi to talk, to have something other than pain to fixate on. But for once, he wasn’t really listening. His mind was stuck on the memory of Rei in the kitchen—flattened against the cabinets, an emotion on his face that Akai saw so little he barely recognized it. Fear.
He knew what Rei was remembering. A rite of passage for Organization members who earned a codename.
In vino veritas.
Akai had been under as Moroboshi Dai for a few months, making his bones as a sharpshooter without many scruples, when he crossed paths with Organization operative Wine—or Vino, as everyone called her. She was an interrogation specialist—but in a syndicate like that, interrogation just meant torture. She was the one they called when somebody was being considered for promotion. Her specialty was precision techniques: torture that could push recruits past the breaking point without leaving them permanently damaged. A different program every time, tailored to her subject.
It’d been four years, but Akai still remembered his initiation. Gin ran him like a dog all that week, a few missions back to back so he was tired, off his game. In an abandoned warehouse out by the water, Vino hung him until his shoulder separated—popped out of the socket and left him gasping, his long hair slicked to his face, the hurt throbbing like a siren under his skin.
She told him they knew everything—who he was, who he worked for. Vino ran the blade of her knife along his knuckles, tiny little stinging cuts, and said she’d take his long sniper’s fingers apart one joint at a time. NOCs die slow, she promised, yanking his head back by his ponytail. If he gave her what she wanted, maybe he’d die a little faster.
By the end, it was just a smear of pain. But he must not have said anything, because they dumped him back at his apartment instead of into a drainage ditch. Akai crawled into bed and lay there like a sick dog for two days, letting Akemi’s calls go to voicemail, until he could answer the phone without his voice hoarse from shouting.
It wasn’t the only time he’d been tortured. But it was by far the closest he ever came to talking. So when the whispers started circling that Vino was back in town, coming for that savvy blond spitfire who’d been rising through the ranks under Vermouth, Akai knew what came next.
He had hoped, before then, that Amuro Tohru might be a NOC. Now he hoped he wasn’t, because it was easier, if you really had nothing to give up.
Four days later, Vermouth introduced him as Bourbon fresh off the interrogation. In an abandoned auto body shop, he stood at the center of the floodlights with one hand clenched tight into his vest, curled around it like a feral animal. When he shifted, Akai understood why. Vino had taken Bourbon’s hands—those clever, dexterous hands that were so quick at defusing a bomb, hotwiring a luxury LS, slipping a bug in between the cuff and the sleeve—and shoved slivers of bamboo up under his fingernails until they bristled like shrapnel.
He could see Bourbon trembling, clinging to his stubborn pride just to stay upright. As soon as the meet was over, Akai caught him by the jacket and hauled Bourbon back to his truck, and spent forty-five minutes tweezing every scrap of bamboo out from under his nails, so he wouldn’t have to do it himself.
It was the first moment they’d ever been alone. The first time Rei bitched about his whiskey, though he drained the flask all the way down. The first risk Akai had ever taken since going under—because professional criminals weren’t worth his compassion, but Akai just couldn’t leave him there, in the floodlights, a spectacle for Vermouth’s entertainment.
He wondered if Rei remembered it the same way. Or maybe it was a black box for him, a memory too brutal to touch.
Akai let out a long breath, glancing up at the boy on his car. Sometimes Akai thought, with the right training, Shinichi could be one of the best intelligence agents in the world. But right now, tying off the gauze around his tiny bandaged hand, he thought Rei was probably right. He didn’t want Shinichi to follow in their footsteps—not even walk in the same direction.
“Take this,” Akai said, handing Shinichi half an extra-strength Tylenol. Then he picked the boy up and carried him back to the house, so he wouldn’t get oil stains on his socks. “Let’s check in with Rei. He’s probably got dinner ready by now.”
Shinichi threw him a quick, worried glance. “Is he…okay?”
“He’s fine,” Akai said, and hoped he wasn’t lying.