Learning Experiences
I.
Yohji had always considered himself to be a fairly laid-back person. One would have to be, given his coworkers. Between Ken’s flashes of temper and Aya’s cold hatred of basically anyone who wasn’t himself or his sister, and Omi’s – well – adolescence, things at the shop could get a little tense.
Yohji was the oldest (and the wisest, he liked to say), and so it often fell on him to be the peacekeeper. He didn’t mind. He could be patient and understanding and all that jazz.
Then he met Schuldig.
And learned that he really wasn’t as patient and understanding and laid-back as he thought he was.
Or maybe the telepath just brought out the worst in everyone.
II.
“Like this,” Schuldig said.
Yohji gave a frustrated sigh. “This is stupid.”
“Thumbs like this,” Schuldig repeated, repositioning him. “Elbows straight.”
“Why are we doing this again?”
“C’mon, Yohji, it’s the twenty-first century. No assassin can survive without knowing how to shoot a gun. I don’t care how good you are with those wires. Why do you think we’re always kicking your ass?”
“Because you’re psychic?”
“Now aim using the sites along the top of the gun.”
“I’m going to miss and you’re going to laugh at me.”
Schuldig smirked. “What, are you psychic now, too?”
“No,” Yohji said, and fired with a slight grunt. “Just smart.”
III.
Yohji was never sure of exactly why Schuldig watched soap operas, despite Schuldig having given two perfectly valid reasons: 1) the woman upstairs watched it so he would wind up seeing it whether he wanted to or not, and 2) it really annoyed the hell out of Crawford.
What Yohji really couldn’t explain was why he sometimes got roped into watching them, too, if he happened to be over at the time. What he was sure of was that they were full of shit. He took particular exception to one melodramatic statement of ‘tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’. Yohji had loved and lost, and he was one hundred percent sure that he would have preferred the latter.
“Don’t be stupid,” Schuldig said, with his supremely annoying habit of replying to what Yohji was thinking rather than what he was saying. “Of course it’s better to have loved and lost.”
“Oh, yeah?” Yohji asked. “What the hell would you know? It’s not like you’ve ever loved and lost. Hell, you don’t even like most people.”
Schuldig shrugged. “I’ve felt it, though. Once you feel something, you know, you can’t unfeel it. You should feel as much as possible. Love, hate, lose, win, whatever. You only get one shot at this. Feel as much as you can.”
“You know, that doesn’t actually make sense,” Yohji said. “Why wouldn’t I be perfectly happy to go my whole life without ever feeling shit like that?”
“How would you know you were happy, if you had never been sad?” Schuldig countered.
Yohji was silent for a few moments.
“You’re still full of shit,” he finally said.
Schuldig smirked. “Say whatever you want,” he said. “I know how you really feel about it.”
IV.
Working, as he did, with younger guys in a shop that was perpetually filled by women under the age of twenty-five, Yohji had learned to keep a civil tongue in his head.
Not that this was easy, with Omi spending all his time with the flowers and avoiding lugging around bags of sod, and Ken still unable to assemble a basic arrangement that actually looked okay, and Aya just being a general bitch about everything. Nor was it easy with the girls basically trying to molest him every time he turned around. Yohji loved women, but these girls needed to learn to keep their hands to themselves.
On a particularly trying day, one of the girls leaned in too close at an inopportune time and startled him, causing him to drop the flower pot he was carrying, which broke, destroying both the pot and the arrangement he had just spent the last half hour creating.
“Verflucht!” he declared.
“What’s that mean?” Omi asked, full of curiosity like any teenager should be.
“Nothing,” Yohji snapped.
“Where’d you learn it?” Omi asked, clearly more interested than Yohji was comfortable with.
“Ken. Go ask him.” Yohji gave Omi a shove in the direction of the greenhouse and fled the scene before anyone could realize he had learned how to swear in German.
V.
Schuldig was, pretty much, remorselessly evil.
He admitted this readily when the question was put to him, and made no excuses. He just didn’t care about other people, so killing them was easy. Sure, maybe he was crazy. Maybe it was because he was a telepath. Or maybe he was just an asshole. He didn’t know and didn’t care. The life he had wound up in was one he enjoyed, and it required him to kill people, so he did without hesitation.
Yohji knew that he couldn’t really throw stones when it came to this sort of thing. He understood, perhaps better than the others, that what they did wasn’t really ‘right’, whatever that meant anyway. Killing evildoers that the law either wouldn’t or couldn’t punish sounded great in theory, but it was still murder. If one believed in Hell, then he and the others were going there regardless of why they killed who they killed.
He did it because he had long ago decided that it was worth that price.
He knew that Schwarz found them all very amusing and that Schuldig especially thought they were hypocrites, so one day when he was lying in Schuldig’s bed thinking about the mission he had to go on that night, he asked, “Why do you do this?”
Schuldig glanced over at him, understanding the nuances of the question even though Yohji would never speak them out loud. Why do you make love to me when you hate everything I stand for?
The redhead let out a soft chuckle. “Because you aren’t like the others.”
“Meaning?”
“You don’t lie to yourself. You don’t tell yourself that what you’re doing is right. You don’t use justice as an excuse. Seriously, do you have any idea how exhausting it is for me to deal with all the people out there in the world? They all have double thought-lines. One of the truth, and one of the lies they tell themselves to cover up the truth. You only have the one. You’ve accepted what you’re doing. You’re not a hypocrite. So in that way, you’re like me.”
At length, Yohji said, “Thanks.”
“We’ll go to Hell together, you and I,” Schuldig said, closing his eyes lazily. “But it’ll be one fuck of a good ride.”
VI.
“Don’t you normally give flowers to the person you love?” Schuldig teased.
Yohji arched an eyebrow at him. “I work in a flower shop,” he said, “and maybe I gave you what I gave you for a reason. Look it up.”
Schuldig made a face at him, but later that night he did look it up, and found that bamboo represented grace and strength in perfect balance with one another. The ability to cope with adversity without giving way. Youth and immortality.
In addition to the symbolism, bamboo was a hardy plant that probably not even Schuldig’s black thumb could kill, which was capable of living on nothing but water for long periods of time. If Schuldig had to go away and was not able to bring the plant, he wouldn’t have to worry about someone taking care of it.
It was a compliment he had not expected to receive, romantic without being mushy, practical without being insulting, and a gift that surprisingly touched Schuldig in a way he had thought he could no longer be touched.
He decided that maybe Yohji knew some things after all.