Softly, M0 traced with the pads of his fingertips every knuckle in M1’s right hand, closely observing and feeling how the skin perfectly covered all the muscle and bone underneath. When the hand moved out of his grasp and motioned forward, gently cupping his cheek, M0 dropped his hands on top of M1’s legs, fiddling with the fabric clothing his body every now and then.

As one of his hands caressed M0’s pale features, M1 also motioning his other hand forward and fully cupped his face, which got neatly framed in between them. He brought his body closer to M0, who also inched his upper body forward without any complaint on their almost glued bodies. With a soft bump of the tip of their noses, M1 put his face near M0’s, his grey eyes lovingly gazing to the equally grey ones that looked right back at him. A gentle smile was present on both of their faces as the two of them finally enjoyed their very first meeting alone, without any worker of the lab or another M present.

M1 let one of his hands slip down through M0’s features, slowly trailing the length of his neck with his fingers and the palm of his hand until it reached his collarbone, where he momentarily stopped his movement and then lightly caressed until his fingers stopped once again, this time on top of his jugular notch.

“Ngh…” M0’s body shivered at the touch and he motioned himself forward even further, closing their distance to a nearly inexistent inch. He softly rubbed his face on the hand still present on his cheek and then gave a quick bump with the tip of his nose on M1’s.

M1 once again started moving his hand, rustling his fingers through the shirt that M0 was wearing until it reached his lap. He then circled his waist with his arm, his hand landing on his lower back. With the limb that had remained on M0’s soft features, he trailed his cheek and lips with his thumb, pressing slightly more on the latter to separate them just a small gap.

When M1 made just a little bit more of pressure on his lips, M0 fully parted his pinkish lips and M1’s thumb gently accessed the insides of his mouth. M1 first gave a quick touch to one of his mandibular canines and then slipped it further inside, slowly caressing the moist tongue and erupting one more shiver out of him. “Ngh… Ah—“

“O-Okay, enough with the flirting for now!” yelped Murayama when he heard the half-moan that escaped from M0’s mouth. His face held a blush from the scene occurring in the backseat, which he could clearly see through the rear-view mirror as he drove the humvee. On the passenger seat beside him, Umiko’s brain had long stopped working and she was now a red furnace releasing steam due to the lack of inhibitions that both of the targets were currently displaying while touching each other.

“…” Both M1 and M0 looked sideways to the soldier and then back to one another. M1 simply continued to ignore the two soldiers in the front side of the car and proceeded with his touches, motioning his upper body forward and pushing M1’s body backwards in reverse.

“I’ll put you two in separate cars, one in the first humvee and the other on the very last one,” warned Murayama, straightforwardly looking to M1 through the mirror with a small frown on his face. “Is that what you want?”

“You don’t have enough space to do something like that,” pointed out M1, straightening his back slightly to look over to the soldier once again.

“Try me. I’ll find a way to do it, even if I have to tie one of you to the roof rack of the humvee and carry you that way until the airport,” challengingly remarked Murayama, the frown getting more accentuated on his brows as he continued to glance to the rear-view mirror.

When Murayama saw the two targets reluctantly separating their bodies and seating straight on the backseat, though still very close to one another, he released a sigh. Apparently, this was another thing that they would have to be educated on: there are some displays of affection that simply aren’t done when others are around, even if you don’t care about their presence or, to a bigger extent, existence.

Murayama continued to silently drive the car, every now and then taking a peek to the two targets to certificate himself that they weren’t up to any more funny business on the backseat.

“Why don’t you two take a nap or something?” asked Murayama all of a sudden, once again fully looking to the targets through the mirror. “Even if you are ‘mass murder machines’, you must be tired after killing the workers and then destroying the lab, right?”

“Lesson number one in mass murder machines,” started M1, fiddling with M0’s hand and fingers on his lap. “What you categorize as ‘sleeping’ is not done by us. We don’t need to sleep or take naps. We need to rest from time to time, yes, but it’s not done with the same frequency as you humans, nor in the same way. Actually, you opened M3’s cell while he was in his resting period.”

“Are you guys actually machines or something like that?” inquired Murayama, an eyebrow slightly arched at hearing that explanation. “Like, made of metal and ran by some sort of battery?”

“No, our bodies are just like yours,” answered M1, entwining his fingers with M0’s while slightly adjusting his body to enable M0 a more comfortable position when he leaned the side of his head on his shoulder. “We possess the same organs and muscles and they operate in the exact same way that yours do. We have simply been modified in a way that enables us to be much faster, stronger, smarter… Well, pretty much better in every single aspect. You can say, in a roundabout way, that we are human beings, version 2.0.”

“So you guys don’t have supernatural powers or something along those lines?” asked further Murayama, trying to ignore the condescending tone that M1 was once again using while comparing his own ‘species’ to the rest of the human race.

“I don’t really understand what you mean by ‘supernatural powers’ but I don’t think we possess such a feature in us,” answered M1, also leaning his head on top of M0’s.

“But… Didn’t you say that you have never met each other? And that you only communicated through letters?” pointed out Murayama, his eyes now directed to the road. “How did all of you know how to sing that creepy song? You can’t explain the rhythm of a song through a letter – you need to actually listen to it.”

“We know the song because we hear M0 singing it every day,” shortly explained M1 as he snuggled M0’s body against his own, a soft smile on his lips as he looked over to his relaxed demeanour.

“You are all on separate floors. No matter how loudly he sings, it’s impossible for M5 to have hea—“ started saying Murayama but he interrupted his own words when he finally understood what M1 had previously meant about having listened to the soldiers talking in between themselves. “All of you have augmented hearing.”

“Correct,” acknowledged M1, a smirk on his features as he switched his gaze back to Murayama. “We perpetually heard every single conversation that happened inside of the lab. That’s how we discovered the codes to open our cells. We did try to communicate by using our augmented hearing to our advantage but it was impossible since our cells were wire-trapped and every time we tried to send messages to anyone, we were eventually discovered and then accordingly punished for it. That’s why we ended up developing the method of communicating through secretly placed letters. It was an extremely slow method of communication but… we did have a lot of time in our hands to carefully plan everything that is happening tonight.”

“Okay, so you have super hearing, super speed and super strength,” started enumerating Murayama, not only voicing it out loud to talk and obtain more information from M1 but also to register it in his brain. “Anything else that should be added?”

“I don’t think you have a brain developed enough to memorize all of it,” taunted M1, a sly smirk on his features.

“That’s not a problem,” said Murayama, trying to contain his anger inside. He took one of his hands out of the steering wheel and pressed a button on the small communication device installed near the driver’s seat. “This conversation is now being recorded. This machine won’t forget anything that you say. Oh, I guess that would be another of your characteristics?”

“Hehe… Correct,” acknowledged M1 after one more of his ‘evil’ short laughs. “But answering your questions now wouldn’t be fun, would it? Using a machine to cheat is against the rules. Try another time, Murayama Yamase.”

If I knew it would be like this, I would have switched the recorder on as soon as got inside of the humvee, grudgingly mumbled Murayama in the back of his mind, his hands tightening around the steering wheel. The Ms might have been closed off in those cells for a long time and not have been educated in matters regarding the outside world that weren’t directly connected with killing and destroying, but it seemed that M1 was an expert in mind games and manipulation. It was most likely through such a method that he had found a way to convince the solemn surviving worker of the lab to help them escape from there through the means of this secret mission performed by the Japanese army.

All of the occupants of the vehicle remained silent afterwards. As minutes went by, a soft orange light started appearing on the outside, right on the line of the horizon. M1 immediately lifted his head at it and lightly tugged at M0’s clothes.

“M0, the sun is about to rise,” announced M1, straightening his body once again on the backseat. At hearing his words, M0’s body readily perked up, his head turning around to look at every corner of his surroundings. M1 could only chuckle at such a cute behaviour. “The sun will appear over there.”

M0 followed with his eyes the place being pinpointed and looked over to the horizon, the sky near it having a more light shade compared to the rest. When he saw a sudden brightness appear from the ground and flood the dark sky with a totally different colour, his grey eyes opened wide and he couldn’t help but jump in his seat. He motioned his body towards the window with such speed and strength that it made the vehicle ride on the two wheels on that side only while the other two got suspended in the air.

“W-Woah!” yelped Umiko, tightly grabbing into her seat as the wheels fully touched the road once again and rattled the insides of the humvee with a brain-shaking impact.

“It’s small but…” started saying M0, his eyes unmoving from the circle eradiating an extremely bright light while slowly rising in the horizon. “It’s much, much brighter than the lights inside of the lab. It’s… beautiful… Does this happen every day?”

“Yes, it does,” acknowledged M1, smiling softly to M0, who was on all-fours while on top of his legs, one of his hands grabbing onto the humvee’s door as he continued staring to the outside scenery. “Do you like it?”

“Nn,” acknowledged M0 with a quick nod of his head. Then he tilted his head while keeping his gaze on the sunrise. “Somehow… this reminds me of you, M1.”

“Of me? Why?” asked M0, an eyebrow slightly arched in surprise over those words.

“The ‘sun’ is appearing from underneath the ground and erasing the ‘shadows’ that the ‘moon’ had caused all around the world,” explained M0, switching his grey eyes back to M1 and warmly smiling to him. “You are the ‘sun’ that took me outside of my ‘garden of shadows’ and set me free for the first time. A freedom which allowed me to meet the other ‘stars’ and see how this world’s ‘sun’ is like. We killed the ‘moon’ together and now the ‘shadow’ can only exist while in the presence of the ‘sun’ and the other four ‘stars’. So if that ball of brightness is the world’s ‘sun’, then you are my own personal ‘sun’, M1.”

“You’re also my own personal ‘shadow’, M0,” added M1, also happily smiling as he circled M0’s waist and pulled him closer to his body. His lips once again joined with M0’s and he leaned his upper body forward, causing M0’s body to remain half laid down on top of his legs as the kiss prolonged.

“Geez… I’m totally putting you two on separate seats while on the airplane…” mumbled Murayama as he rolled his eyes around at the flirting once again going around in the backseat. Most likely, they didn’t even know that what they were doing was straight out making out in public or how that would be seen by outsiders, taking into consideration they were both indubitably of the same sex. A soft smile on his features, Murayama pressed the communication device’s button a second time to put a stop to the recording and then motioned his hand back to the steering wheel, one of his fingers lighting tapping into it. “Ah… This will be a huge pain in the ass, won’t it? I haven’t reached 30 yet but I can already feel my first grey hairs growing…”