Title: The Answer
Author: Tsutsuji
Fandom: GetBackers
Characters/Pairing: Ban x Akabane
Rating & Warnings: angst, implied yaoi, implied violence. Edited, not beta'd.
Word count: 640
For AmethystHunter. Written as a 30-minute freewrite with the prompt "Ban/Akabane, angst/comfort."
He's too thin, all scarred skin and bone; even with whatever strange metalic chemistry passes for blood in his body, Jackal weighs hardly enough to notice when Ban pulls him up from the ground.
"What are you doing, trying to die?" he asks, but the only answer is a grunt that he guesses is more from pain than it is a response to the question, at least he hopes so. "If that's a yes, too bad," he grumbles, shifting the lanky body to get a better grip, so he can keep his balance while carrying it over the uneven rocks up the side of the pit. Tatters of black cloth flap in the wind, strands of damp black hair blow up into his face, whip against his cheek. "By the way, you look terrible," he says, conversationally.
"Do shut up, Midou-kun," Akabane hisses through clenched teeth.
Ban chuckles, humorlessly. That still wasn't an answer to the question that should have been rhetorical, but the more he thinks about it, the more he wonders if it's true. How else could Dr Jackal have come to be lying in a broken heap at the bottom of a crater made by gods-knew-what abomination of nature? Transporters attract all the wrong kind of attention under the best circumstances, but lately he'd been hearing stories of crazier and crazier jobs being taken on, situations that no other Transporter would touch, no Protector would even go near.
"What'd they hit you with, a bazooka?" he asks, turning at the edge of the crater to look back.
Jackal makes a pointless attempt to raise his head and stand on his own, gasps and falls against him, dropping his head in what Ban finally realizes is meant to be a nod.
"Something like that," Akabane wheezes in answer. "In human form."
"Nice."
Ban lets him lean for a minute, listens to him gasp air into his lungs, feels the catch of each breath. Cracked ribs, he guesses. Lucky those lungs weren't punctured by his own pointy, metal-laced bones, but it's the blood loss that worries him the most. Jackal has to really work at it to shed that much blood in one fight, he knows for a fact. Bits of metal glint in the weak sunlight, embedded in the crumbled, bloodstained cement all across the crater.
He also knows from experience that Akabane begins to recover from a loss like this within hours, and is back to full strength in a day or so, thanks to his crazy metabolism - usually. Normally, he could pull all of those broken bits of blades right back into his body, all to be blended into his flesh and blood, restoring him like some weird kind of transfusion. But even his system can't recover quickly enough to keep up with him these days, not when he manages to get himself torn apart like this on nearly a daily basis. From what Ban's been hearing, this has been going on for weeks now, ever since the last - what he intended to be the very last - time they'd fought, and he'd won, and refused once again to make Jackal's defeat definitive and final.
"What ...are you ...doing here... anyway... Ban-kun?" Jackal asks, his voice as smooth and cool as ever between harsh gasps. "Surely... you weren't... hoping to ... take back... the object..."
"Huh," Ban grunts. He turns away from the sight of the lost battle, keeping his arm around Akabane's thin body to pull him along. His hand, cluching thin ribs somewhere under the shreds of black coat, is sticky wet.
Something tells him Akabane won't like his answer, but he gives it anyway.
"I'm in the Recovery business, remember? I told you once, I use my strength to help someone. Even if they don't particularly want to be saved... "