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They argue outside his door, low, tight, but not so quiet he can't hear them.
Schuldig's voice sounds harsher than usual, more high-strung, and it sets Farfarello's nerves on edge: Schuldig never sounds nervous; he gets pissed off, annoyed, but this is different. He wonders if maybe it has to do with him, if he went too far earlier, on the boat, and rejects the thought instantly. Schuldig ought to have known better than to try to lay a hand on his Sally, just like he himself would never have touched one of Schuldig's claims. There's a line there; he doesn't care why it was crossed, just that it was.
"Are you fucking serious," Schuldig's saying, a mishmash of German and English, "now? With Farblos on our asses, you want me to try it now?"
Crawford, controlled as usual: "There won't be time later. It has to be now - if you can do it at all."
"And if I can't?" Schuldig demands.
There's silence. Farfarello sits absolutely still and listens. Across his room, Sally sleeps in the small bed, her breathing deep and even. Outside, no one talks.
"Christ," Schuldig swears finally, and Farfarello's eye flicks back to his malefici, feeling... uncertain, off balance at the blasphemy. He doesn't like it. "You can never give me a straight fucking answer. What happens if I pull this off and I'm useless for a week and they pick up a fourth to replace Rudolph after all, huh?"
"Then we'll deal with that."
Schuldig tch's loudly, an irritating habit he picked up sometime in Japan. "Nice reassurance," he says, and swings the door open. The light from the hallway spills into the room and Farfarello tenses where he sits, hunched up against the back wall. Schuldig's watching him, hand still on the doorknob, and Farfarello doesn't like this either: his eyes are cold, looking at Farfarello like he's something to be taken care of, a distasteful job; not a teammate, not even one of his toys to be played with.
He shifts, slightly, making the calculations on how far it is to his knives on the table next to the wall, how fast Schuldig can move when he really wants to, tries to deal with the variable of Crawford standing behind Schuldig, gun in hand.
It's not good.
"Come on," Schuldig says, "Get up. We have work to do."
Farfarello looks away for just a split second, checking on Sally again though he can tell she's still asleep by the sound of her breathing. Schuldig doesn't move, just stands there and waits, so he stands slowly, takes a step towards his knives, lying in a tangle of leather and buckles.
"No." Crawford's voice carries and he stops mid-step, looking up over Schuldig's shoulder. "You don't need them."
Schuldig mutters something that Farfarello can't quite catch and turns, brushing past Crawford roughly as he leaves. After a moment, Crawford follows, leaving the door open.
He wonders if he'll regret it, whatever it is, but he goes anyway, closing the door gently behind him so as not to wake Sally. When he gets into the hallway, the others have left.
The furnished apartment they'd picked up in Rotterdam is a lot smaller, shabbier than what they've been used to: two bedrooms, kitchen, tiny common room. He and Sally have one, Crawford and Schuldig the other; Nagi is sleeping on the lumpy sofa - Farfarello hears it squeak as he walks past.
At the end of the hallway, the kitchen door stands slightly ajar; he pushes it open. Schuldig is sitting at the kitchen table, leaning his elbows on it, in a parody of his normal lazy sprawl: he's tight, tense, despite the pose. At the sink, Crawford fills a glass of water, sips, sets it down.
"Sit down," Crawford says.
"What," Farfarello begins, and is interrupted almost before he can finish the word.
"Sit. Down." Schuldig repeats, the words heavy with power, and Farfarello, stunned, feels his body moving without his control, walking forwards, collapsing into the chair across from Schuldig.
Crawford raises an eyebrow. "Should you...?"
You want me to do this, shut up and let me do it, Schuldig snaps back, reaching out and setting his hand on Farfarello's bare wrist.
Farfarello doesn't like the sound of this more and more. He's just gathering his strength to try to break Schuldig's mental hold on him when suddenly reality drops out from under him in a sickening blur. When his vision clears, he's standing, staggering, somewhere... else.
His first snatched thought is that it's Hell: it's full of shifting colors and an odd sort of pressure that weighs him down, even though he can move freely now, strange sensations that prickle over his skin, and sound, bits and pieces that almost sound like voices, pulsing in waves just under a whisper, too low to understand.
"It's not that bad," he hears behind him, and spins: Schuldig's standing there, half-smiling, but his eyes are still dead serious, and Farfarello thinks maybe this is the closest he's ever gotten to seeing him afraid, even including yesterday's fight. It's... interesting.
Schuldig scoffs, walking forward; the world shifts with him, disorientingly, and Farfarello can't seem to move away fast enough to keep Schuldig from getting hold of him again. The lopsided smile grows into a wide grin, Schuldig's teeth flashing bright at him. "You better hope this works," he says.
Farfarello says "What works?" and everything dissolves again, the wild colors skewing, whirling, vanishing, replaced by flat gunmetal blue fading to a distant horizon. Schuldig's fingers are loose on his arm, his eyes distant, unseeing; Farfarello jerks away, his boots echoing against the hard floor.
"The end of Farblos won't be the end of Rosenkreuz," Crawford says, and Farfarello has been snuck up on far too many times today to put up with it any longer - but if Crawford is going to explain, then he'll wait. He'll listen. For a while.
Crawford glances around the empty space, at Schuldig, then back to Farfarello. "Sally complicates things," he continues. "If she is left alone," - he ignores Farfarello's subvocal snarl at the suggestion - "then Eszet will retake her, which is unacceptable. If you accompany her, Schwarz will be at a disadvantage later."
Schuldig still hasn't moved, which makes Farfarello deeply uneasy. "Where are we?"
"My mind." Crawford smiles faintly, and somehow Farfarello feels that it's an acknowledgment of the emptiness around them.
"What are you doing?" he asks bluntly, and for once nothing strange follows that.
"If Schuldig can connect us, we can...." He pauses; a ripple shudders through the floor, like an earthquake. "We can continue without her presence becoming an... issue."
Again, he feels the layers of meanings behind that, understands them all unspoken, eerily clear. Abruptly, something pulls hard inside his head, tears with a blinding flash, and for half a second that feels like years he's lost in a tangled mess of passages branching off in all directions. They fade to blueish gray again with a slight wobble, but he realizes slowly that he can still feel them, lurking in the back of his mind, and - he knows how to get there again, just a twist of thought like so...
He smells blood, suddenly, and on the heels of it the world flickers and gives a final godawful lurch - and he's back in the dingy kitchen. Across from him, Schuldig has his hands over his face, blood trickling between his fingers and down along the back of his hand, disappearing into the sleeve of his jacket.
There's something... strangely different in his head, hazy, but he can't quite remember what happened, why he feels so... Why he's here, in the kitchen, instead of watching over Sally. He stands abruptly, catching a glimpse of Crawford moving to stand over Schuldig, glass in hand, as he turns and leaves. Whatever it is, Crawford can take care of it, he's somehow more than sure.