Bad to Worse
Lena
Warnings: spoiler, EP 21...uh, sort of. Also, Psychotic! Yohji.
Distantly, he could hear Ken screaming for help. Something about Omi. Omi was in trouble? He had to help...had to get over to them so he could find out what was wrong. Omi had the detonator. They couldn't bomb the place without Omi.
A punch landed across his face, another; his mind, already fogged by fatigue, worry and pain, became completely cloudy. He couldn't even really see his assailants anymore, just feel them beating the living shit out of him.
Things were looking pretty bad.
Yohji, he wondered distantly, out of nowhere. Where's Yohji, what the hell is he doing? Is he dead? There was no way to tell; the world before him was dim, growing darker by the moment, highlighted only by blinding flashes of pain. It wasn't really so bad; he had faced worse hundreds of times over; but there was no one to back him up. Yohji was unaccounted for, something was wrong with Omi, and for some reason, Ken couldn't help.
They were in trouble.
. . .
Omi gasped, shakily, but he was still breathing. Heart in his throat, Ken watched. He didn't know what to do-- what could he do?-- so he held his teammate and forced himself to watch, to listen in case Omi came up with any plans. He was just the muscle guy. He didn't have any experience with poisons, toxins, antidotes. What could he do?A hot flush had risen in the boy's face, and inflamed veins ran like blood-sucking red tendrils up his legs from the cut that had let the poison in. Omi convulsed again, and Ken clutched the boy's too-warm body closer. It wasn't going to take long. It was going to kill Omi in a matter of seconds, and there was nothing he could do. What was Aya doing up there? Yohji?
Omi's eyes opened wide, not focused on anything. In a very small, trembling voice, he addressed the vague blur that he gathered must be Ken.
"...K-ken...grab the detonator...'s in m-my coat pocket..." He shuddered again, blinking back tears of pain. Being killed from the inside out hurt, and at that, it fucking hurt a lot. If he was going to die, he was certainly not letting Weiss get their asses kicked while it happened. "...g-got it?" He whispered urgently, hoping that Ken couldn't tell that it hurt just to speak.
One of Ken's hands was supporting him, holding him close and keeping him from falling further into the little chasm that had opened beneath them. The other, which had been hovering uncertainly before his face, moved with shaky uncertainty to check the pockets on the inside of his jacket, and fumblingly found the detonator, pulling it free with some difficulty and a little low cursing. "Yeah," Ken finally answered, watching Omi's face in the horrible fear that, for some reason, Omi might just give up on him and die here, while he was holding Omi's body in his arms. Back in the far corner of his mind, the part of him that mandated his sanity warned that if Omi up and died in his arms, he wasn't going to come back from the edge again. Ever.
Omi didn't try to smile or anything reassuring like that, but he didn't look like he was about to just stop breathing either. Not yet. He took a deep breath. "...press...blue button...o-okay?"
Without hesitation, Ken did as asked, because Ken was, if anything, very good at taking orders. Ignoring the body convulsing, trembling in his arms, he glared at the little detonator, trying to discern color in the dim filtered light from above, and when he found the button in question, he stabbed at it with one vengeful thumb. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Omi had only been willing to come back to this lab with the promise that they would rig it to explode, on the off-chance that Masafumi's mutated army was still around to do Schreient's dirty work. An escape route, Omi had called it.
Ken couldn't help feeling that irony was breathing down his neck right now.
The world around them rocked, almost sending them off the edge and into the pit of the chasm; the debris showering down hit them in all sorts of sensitive places. He could hear the sounds of the iron grate that had trapped them screeching away over the floor above, opening a gap wide enough for them to crawl through. He could hear something loud and tortured and hoped that Yohji and Aya were all right, suddenly realizing that they weren't necessarily a match for four psycho bitches with a vengeance complex.
That loud something vied with the explosion for supremacy in his hearing. The explosion won, but the scream-- Yohji's scream-- it was Yohji-- lingered in his mind long after the aftershocks faded.
He looked down at Omi, considering his options. He was good, but he might not be able to drag them both out of here.
Omi shivered, breathing rapid and shallow. He didn't have a choice; tossing the detonator into the old, sealed rooms of the army base below them, he hefted the boy's surprisingly heavy body over his shoulder and started climbing.
. . .
"Ai shiteru, Masafumi."He could feel something....unclean, unsanitary....struggling on his back. He felt the need to kill it, so he did. He was death incarnate, at the moment, and while there was a certain sick horror to it, there was a sick fascination that came with the territory.
An explosion sent him sprawling, sent the dead filth flying away from him, out of his immediate sight, into the shadows and rubble. Oh well. It was dead, didn't matter anyway. A little ways away, there were four people struggling to maintain their balance against the heat, the blast of the explosion. He did wonder a little where it had come from, but no matter.
Oh, make that three.
The fourth figure was sprawled on the ground. Looked like it might not start moving again.
Knowing what he was...was an immense relief. He was not Yohji Kudou, seducer of women, ex-private eye. No, the man who threw spindly threads out to catch the three standing figures and yank them off-balance, surprise them, maybe scare them a little before he strangled him-- that was who he was. His job was to listen to the sound of struggling as it became less desperate, as it ceased. His job was simple. Elegant.
All he had to do was kill them all, and frankly, he was going to enjoy it.
The figures, breaking free of his silver threads with astonishing alacrity, started to dance away, evading him, much to his irritation. He was, despite his newfound sense of purpose, not feeling his best and a little too slow to catch them. The smallest one lunged at him, screaming words that didn't matter, distraught, sobbing through her threats as she tried to wound him. In the end, they were forced apart, for he would have gladly killed her then; the other two dragged her away, leaving him with the fourth figure, lying on the ground.
Not exactly fair, but if this last proved to be alive yet, he could remedy that.
Cautiously, he walked over to the body, black and sinuous, spread out on the floor, and prodded it with his toe. He didn't speak, didn't remember the need for words. The body twitched. Mm, alive then? A smile spread over his face that was gleaming white, a bone-smile, a death-smile, and he knelt by the man's head and slipped a noose of silver about his pale throat. The widening of shocked, violet eyes as he pulled, the fear staring back up at him, that reassured him. He was inescapable. Nothing lived forever. Not even the three who had gotten away. He could follow them later.
"Y-yohji," choked the creature, lifting black-coated fingers to pull weakly at the wire.
Yohji?
He wasn't Yohji. He was death. He would kill everything. It was the be-all end-all of his very existence. To make this point, he pulled tighter, growling under his breath. "You think that just because we're after the same people, you won't die eventually?" A low chuckle escaped from him, wretched, horrible. "Everything dies. Everything I touch..."
. . .
His knuckles were bruised, bleeding. There was the sting of pain but, he thought fuzzily, nothing unusually sharp to the bite of it. He didn't think he was poisoned. He was pretty sure he was all right. Better to keep focused on climbing out of here, as fast as possible. Omi was disturbingly still, save raspy little winces that came regularly enough that Ken had to assume it was the sound of his breathing.They were close. Just a little farther and he would probably be able to lift Omi out, lay him on the ground and follow with slightly better speed. He entertained, briefly, the thought of shouting for Aya and Yohji again, but wasn't entirely certain that Aya and Yohji had had much of a chance to take cover before he'd detonated Omi's bomb. He reached up and hooked his fingers into cracking cement, and pulled with all his might, ignoring the stabs of pain that lanced down his arms, informing him of pulled muscles, of his own weariness.
Too bad. Too damn bad. He couldn't give up yet. Omi was in trouble.
They reached the top and he took a deep breath before heaving up enough to get Omi onto safe ground. The boy sat up, dazedly, and slowly scooted away from the hole, wincing at every motion, sneakers scrabbling over dust and gravel. His legs, from just below the knee and up, looked like he'd been infected with a horrible science-fiction plague that eventually turned you into an alien when it was done causing you a whole lot of pain. Ken wasn't entirely certain that it wasn't one.
He pulled himself up and hesitated. "Aya? Yohji?" It came out a low cough. They looked around the rubble aimlessly, trying to pinpoint the location of their teammates.
Off a little ways, he thought he could see two dark figures struggling.
Knowing that Omi would stay where he was-- Omi didn't have much choice at the moment anyways-- Ken struggled to his feet, slipping on his bugnuks and bracing himself to assist whichever of the figures was his teammate.
He didn't really know what to do when he realized that both figures were his teammates, and that one was killing the other. "Yohji?" He croaked, puzzled, weary, not ready to deal with this. If they were all screwed up then things were going to get real ugly real fast here.
Yohji turned to look at him, and grinned. It was the most frightening thing Ken had ever seen Yohji do, and it made him take an involuntary step backwards. While Yohji was distracted, however, Aya used what little strength he had and ripped free of the wire about his throat before using his sheathed katana to hit Yohji in the gut.
Hard.
Suddenly, the confidence and insanity dimmed in Yohji's eyes and he doubled over. "J-jesus, Aya," He whispered, hoarsely. "That fucking hurt..."
Realizing that they were basically screwed and that, if they were going to be screwed, they were going to do so together, as a team, or he'd probably have to just kill himself to end his misery, Ken knelt next to Aya and helped him up. "Omi's hurt. Bad," he whispered urgently, his voice sounding like sandpaper.
Aya pretended that he hadn't just been half-strangled to death by his teammate, and made it look good. "We have to get out before the building collapses."
Looking nervously from Yohji to Aya again, Ken bit his lip. "He's poisoned. I don't think there's an antidote." Aya was having none of it. He glanced at Yohji, lying crumpled on the floor, and then swiftly knelt and helped the other man up. Slinging Yohji's arm across his back and carrying the majority of Yohji's weight, he sent a meaningful look Ken's way.
"We get out. Then you tell me the damage. Let's go."
Ken was used to taking orders. So he went and gathered Omi in his arms, and they left.
. . .
They got up to the crest of a nearby hill before Yohji went into complete shock and stopped moving altogether. It was still a little too close to the lab for Aya's comfort, but it would have to do. Yohji hugged his knees and whimpered, and neither Siberian nor Abyssinian could stand watching him. They were a little afraid that if they watched, they might end up joining in.Omi was in bad shape. Once they'd gotten outside of the flaming building, he'd put his foot down-- literally-- and forced Ken to stop carrying him. Ken was stumbling and falling an inordinately large number of times, he said shakily, and ought to worry about himself. Now Omi sat on the edge of the hill, looking back at the wreckage they'd come from, and shivered like he would never stop, eyes half-closed.
Swallowing, Ken turned pleading eyes to Aya. "What do we do? There's no cure," he said, voice a little stronger than before. The four of them still being alive thus far was doing him a lot of good, confidence-wise, but Omi remained in harm's immediate path, and that was doing him an equal amount of damage.
Aya, who seemed to be unflappable, was silent for a long moment, and resisted the urge to run his fingers over the marks on his throat from Yohji's wire. "How bad is it?" He finally asked, his gaze coming to rest on the boy in question.
Secretly, this made Ken nervous. Aya was wearing an expression that, in a different lifetime, might have been worn by a research scientist who didn't have a problem with animal testing. "I...I dunno. His legs..."
Aya knelt down next to Omi, and Ken followed suit; the boy was struggling too hard with his lungs to notice them. With delicate caution, Aya lifted the fabric of Omi's t-shirt to examine him, exerting gentle pressures on all possible sensitive points. Omi whimpered loudly if Aya's black-gloved fingers came anywhere near the red lines that the toxin had made as it traveled through his bloodstream, rising to his heart. The lines covered his stomach and chest like a complex tattoo. Aya looked at all this with a grim lack of emotion and stood, turning away from Omi and Ken to look at Yohji, wondering if Yohji was going to be all right.
Ken swallowed nervously, stayed where he was. "What do we do, Aya?"
"We'll have to contact Kritiker and see what they can offer Omi."
Nearby, a sound suspiciously similar to a sob broke from Yohji's throat. They both forced themselves not to look. "I can carry him back to the car..."
Violet eyes fixed bewildered blue with a significant look. "You'll do no such thing," Aya answered, slipping a cell phone out of a pocket that Ken hadn't even realized existed amongst the mess of buckles that was Aya's coat. "Call and let them know the situation. I'll carry Omi."
At that moment, he wanted to say something rebellious; maybe point out that Aya was in worse condition than he was, or that Yohji still had to be coaxed to follow them from here. But there was no reason to say anything like that, or get annoyed with the other man for refusing to allow him to overtax himself further. He flipped open the cell and dialed Manx's number.
Aya considered Omi's body for a long moment before crouching down and addressing Bombay directly. "I'm going to carry you back to the car. What hurts worst?"
For a long moment, there was no answer, just the same trembling and gasping that had been shaking Omi's body for the last twenty minutes. Then, as if from forever away, Omi's voice answered back in a mumble through Omi's mouth, which seemed to refuse to move.
"...movin'...movin' anithin'..."
Tone slightly softened, Aya answered almost apologetically, "I'll try not to move you very much," and slipped his arms underneath Omi, lifting him. The boy did an excellent job of not crying out, going very tense and making a soft noise in his throat as gravity and his own inability to move caused his joints to bend, his muscles to flex.
Manx answered on the fourth ring, while Ken watched Aya's back retreat oh-so-painfully-slow down the hill towards their car. "Manx here," her voice said, sounding surprised to be receiving a call from this particular number.
"This is Siberian. Bombay's badly hurt. Where can we go?"
There was a pause, and the sound of computer keys clacking. "Location?" He told her, watching Yohji. He didn't know if he should say anything about Yohji. After a great deal more clacking-- Aya was almost all the way down the hill-- Manx answered him. "The hospital four miles to your east is your best bet. Ask for doctor Kugara."
"Right." They severed the connection. Good news: it would be no problem to just go tell Aya where the hospital was. Bad news: he still didn't know what to do about his erstwhile teammate, who was currently crying to himself and rocking ever so slightly back and forth. He took a tentative step closer, remembering what Yohji had been doing to Aya when he'd found them.
Yohji's ragged voice rose up in the air like a raven. It scared him, possibly a little more than the horrible smile had, earlier. "Stay away, Ken."
He stopped where he was. "Listen, whatever happened to you, Yohji, it'll be okay. We have to go, though, all right? Omi needs to get to a hospital." Somehow, despite the fact that it wasn't himself he was speaking of, Ken suddenly felt horribly selfish. Why wasn't he trying to help Yohji? They were all just as weary, in just as much pain as each other. It just manifested differently. Something that Aya hadn't mentioned had happened while they were trapped in the little pit of that lab, something bad. Maybe Yohji needed some time to himself.
"I'll come back," Yohji said, hoarsely, interrupting his train of thought. "You guys go on. He needs help." It sounded like the older man swallowed a sob. "Take the kid and go. I'll come back eventually."
Ken started to leave, and then hesitated. "Yohji, why were you trying to kill Aya?" The answer was so immediate it startled him. Later, when he looked back on it, he wasn't sure he should have accepted the statement and walked away.
"Because he still has someone left."
But somehow, Ken was feeling just close enough to the insanity radiating from the older man to understand him. Yeah, he could relate to resentment towards someone who still had something to hope for. In the moments when you really lost it, he could understand how that happened to a man.
So he left Yohji on the hill and joined Aya in Aya's sleek black car, and told him where the hospital was.
. . .
It took weeks.Yohji didn't come back until it was all over. Secretly, Aya wondered if perhaps he was psychic in some fashion and had known exactly when things were looking up again. Well, in the strictly physical sense. They were all wrecks anyway, but at least now they were all healthy.
There was, as Ken had been worrying, no cure for the poison that had gotten into Omi's veins, and the ever-capable doctor Kugara had been most entertainingly frustrated with his inability to simply wave a magic wand and cure Weiss so he could send them away. As it turned out, by the time they'd gotten to the hospital, Aya was aware that he needed actual medical treatment as soon as possible, and the scratches that adorned Ken's body had become nasty enough to put Ken in a hopeless fever. Ken's more mundane infection had, at the very least, seemed simple enough to treat and been ignored after they'd give him a nice whopping dose of penicillin.
Then, after bandaging Aya and giving him instructions to be careful, Kugara had happened to flip through Ken's dossier and noted that he had only one allergy.
Penicillin.
Of course.
While Kugara's staff dealt with one monster of an allergic reaction, Kugara himself agonized over Omi's condition and took blood samples, did testing, and probably prayed that things would turn out all right. Omi got paler by the hour, the angry red trace-work of veins that ran across his entire body standing out stark and menacing on his skin. It made Aya nauseous in the pit of his stomach, sitting by Omi's bed, watching him like he'd watched Aya-chan. The difference: it wasn't family. The similarity: he was terrified that the person he was watching would die at any moment.
Miraculously, Omi continued to live through the hours and hours of vigilance on the part of both Aya and Kugara. He didn't get any better, but he didn't get any worse.
Kugara concluded that, whatever it was, it wasn't strong enough, or there wasn't enough of it to destroy the boy's immune system. They were injecting Omi daily with all sorts of helpful little nutrients that, given time, might help his body win the fight with the poison.
Once Ken's fever receded, he became an intolerable patient, utterly irritable and stuck in his bed for the duration of his recovery time. He shared vigil with Aya over Omi's bed. Neither spoke of Yohji.
Aya's neck bruised and healed during the first week. No one commented.
Omi woke up.
. . .
The soft sound of whimpering dragged him into consciousness, and for a sleepy moment, he wondered if perhaps the sound was coming from himself.But the timbre was higher, softer, slightly feminine--
Omi.
"You're awake," he murmured, still sleepy. He hadn't been resting as he ought, but he didn't really give a damn. Ken was snoring softly in a chair across the room. Wide blue eyes opened and locked on him.
"A-aya-kun...what h-happened?"
He considered the possible meaning of this question, and decided that Omi probably remembered just fine what had happened previous to being dragged up the hill. "We brought you to the hospital nine days ago. You've been poisoned by something."
This seemed to be the proper answer. "C-can't move..."
"You aren't healed yet. The doctor assumes that whatever it is, you've developed an immunity."
The boy's voice took on a pleading note. "It h-hurts, Aya-kun...please...isn't there something...?"
Aya was unprepared for an Omi that was willing to be drugged. Omi was the sort of person who would endure the pain of a headache because he didn't like the thought of his senses being dulled for something 'minor'.
He came to the conclusion that Omi must be in a considerable amount of pain if Omi was asking for any painkillers at all, so he stood up and, with a low-voiced reassurance that he would return soon, he started looking. He found Kugara quickly enough, and the doctor did a thorough examination before proclaiming something particularly effective in dulling pain.
It was hard to decide which was more difficult to accept; the doctor prescribing a little morphine, or Omi accepting it. Omi did accept it, but in reassuring, typical Omi fashion. "Just this once, because I'm sure I'll feel better tomorrow." With the shocking efficiency of a well-practiced doctor, Kugara injected his patient and left. Aya watched the boy's pupils dilate until his eyes were black and felt the sudden, insistent need to be elsewhere. He went to check up on Momoe at the shop. She was pleased to see him, and amiably accepted his apology for their absence. He promised that he and Ken, who was also well enough to work, would be in the next day.
They were, and minded the shop by themselves for a week, one or the other of them checking up on Omi daily. It seemed that whenever they saw him, however, he was lost in a haze of painless mindlessness. They traded looks of distrust and secretly contacted Manx to make certain she trusted the doctor, and let it be for another three days.
Omi was mysteriously checked out of the hospital on the fourth day.
Things started to clear up; first Omi's mind, and then the situation in general. By the end of the third week, their youngest teammate was able to walk downstairs without assistance and snag food items from the fridge before returning to his bed.
Yohji returned about then, but didn't say much. They knew better than to ask. Aya wouldn't let Yohji get near him, but it wasn't that Yohji really tried. They walked on eggshells around each other and waited; Omi looked for Schreient's lab, and Aya avoided the shop for hours each day, wandering.
Things were about as normal as they ever got.