Title: Damage

Author: Proverbial Pumpkin

Summary: A blow to the head causes some... complications. Established K/Tohma.

Warnings: Head injury, obviously. Not graphic.

Monday 8:45pm

"Sakuma-san, get in front of me please."

We were hurrying, the three of us. We had to get out. So Tohma's calm, pleasant tone confused Ryuichi, who jogged a few steps to catch up to us. "Are we being normal or not?" he asked, concerned.

"Yes, act normal. But please, hurry up." We were striding past open restaurant doors, over street grates we didn't have time to side-step. Tohma pulled Ryuichi forward by the arm, forcing him in front of us. Ryuichi was arguably the most important of us and the most at risk if we were caught up to – no way was Tohma letting him trail even two steps out of his sight. The company car was on the ground floor of a parking garage nearby and I had the keys in my hand.

But behind us, a star-struck bar party had spilled out of the venue, following us, drawing attention from the rest of the street.

It had been stupid of us, absurd to meet outside of NG without closing the venue to the public. It's a Monday night, Tohma had said. We'll be like normal people, Ryuichi said. Nevermind that it was Tohma's job to flash about the money to secure places before Nittle Grasper steps foot into them. It was my job to know when a room was about to get crowded, before the crowd materializes. It was Ryuichi's job to wear a fucking hat in public. So really, we'd all screwed up.

Now there was a crackle of life to the weekday scene. We'd jolted a normally moderate strip of Tokyo into activity. Tohma and Ryuichi had been recognized, and it was too much to hope for to leave the place without the party – and god knows who else by now – shouting, filming, squealing after us.

Tohma looked over his shoulder and cursed. We were being followed by a pack. "Go. Go. Ryuichi, run."

It wasn't a contained stream of fans, no single current of smiles and camera flashes; we were the epicenter of a hazy disturbance. There was movement at the end of side streets. People ahead of us now were craning their necks in our direction. We were almost to the car, almost safe, but the street ahead was filling in ever so slightly with people, come out to see what was up. Celebrity, that's what.

We each flung open a car door, Tohma in the passenger seat barking obvious orders at us. "K-san, get on the main road. Sakuma-san, get down."

The crowd had reached the parking garage; if the gates hadn't been miraculously open we would have been delayed. But I reversed out of the spot and we peeled out onto the street. Ryuichi made jostled grunts as he attempted to crouch low without unbuckling. It was too late for hiding, though; the crowd had definitely seen our car, and they were running.

It was okay. Let them. We were driving. Almost up to speed. Two lanes, four lanes. Wait, traffic? Fuck, fuck.

"What's happening?" Ryuichi said from the backseat, lying under the window level. "Why are we slowing down?"

We were behind four lanes of completely, utterly still cars. We'd been on the road maybe thirty seconds and now up ahead there were police lights. A barrier of some sort, a fraction of a mile ahead of us. A roadblock.

I glanced in the rearview mirror; not far back, over a hundred people had amassed at the edge of the road, and were already getting in the way of other confused drivers. If they got to us, if they got in front of us, we'd never get out. It would end in broken windows at best, and I didn't like to think about the worst case scenario. Celebrities had been trampled; fans had been run over in situations that started out just like this. There were a pair of cops on the right side of the roadblock; of course we were in the leftmost lane. It would be impossible to communicate with them, and no chance of changing lanes. We weren't moving at all. Behind us, cars began to honk. The mass of bar-goers and night-outers who had heard that Nittle Grasper was just over there were running in our direction. They wanted a piece.

Tohma and I looked at one another, out of ideas. His hands gripped the seat edge as he looked back at Ryuichi, at the jogging fans less than thirty yards away. "We'll be surrounded until those cops realize we need help," I said. Tohma nodded, disconcerted. Antsy. He couldn't stop glancing back at Ryuichi, at his friend. I uselessly re-locked the doors. "Sit up and get in the middle, Ryuichi. You remember. If you see someone with a brick or anything that could break a window, cover your face."

Ryuichi let out an anxious whimper, and that's all it took for Tohma to fucking activate. I heard the click of his seatbelt less than a second before he flung his door open.

Oh hell no. "Tohma!"

Outside the car, he bent slightly and said "go around, on the curb – " he looked behind the car, saw the horde descending. "I'll get it clear. As soon as there's space, get him out of here."

"You think I'm leaving you out here?! "

The door slammed. He took off.

"Shit. Shit. Shit." I turned as sharp left as the Corolla would allow, and pulled out of the traffic. We bumped up onto the curb, and then sped forward. Stationary drivers to our right shouted obscenities. I craned my neck and saw Tohma making an efficient route towards the policemen manning the barrier. I'd never seen him run before; the man could haul. In the mirror, I could see a number of them had veered off after Tohma. The others were coming for Ryuichi.

I didn't see their exchange, never saw exactly how Tohma managed to order a set of cops to dismantle their own roadblock. Probably they knew him, or saw the single-minded, slightly tipsy crowd hot on his heels. My foot hovered over the pedal. The block gate slid to the right. Miserably slowly. I couldn't see Tohma. I inched my way in front of the closest car, whose driver threw something at our window. A cop jogged over from his vehicle and gestured me forward as the gate opened. There were excited pedestrians in everyone's way now, zig-zagging through stalled cars towards us, towards the right side where I'd last seen Tohma. A widening in the block, almost big enough. Almost…

"Hold on," I said over my shoulder, and floored it.

The side mirror scraped against the retracting gate – I'd misjudged that – but there was empty street ahead, finally. We were through.

Open road. Nothing but space, nothing but more and more distance between us and the crowd. Ryuichi turned in the backseat. "Where is Tohma-kun?"

I shook my head. It was a mess back there. A bottleneck trickle of cars following us, a congregation of people where Tohma should have been, where the cops, I hoped, were protecting him. Now that we were out, I felt like a human adrenaline gel. "I'll drop you off and come back for him. What was he thinking? How's he going to get out of that? Idiot!" I needed to calm down; I still had to get Ryuichi to safety.

Ahead, the Tokyo street was normal. No construction, no manhunt.

"And what was that roadblock even for?"

10:42pm

"Random license and registration check." Tohma's voice was his usual – so he was really okay. Well, sure, the police had no reason to lie to me, but it was nice to hear for myself.

I put him on speakerphone and laid my cell on the dashboard. I wasn't about to cruise into the precinct parking lot on the phone with only one hand on the wheel. "On a Sunday night. Figure. That was a dumb maneuver by the way. Getting out of the car."

"Sakuma-san was in danger. How much longer are you going to be?"

"I came as soon as you called, stop being a snowflake. I'll be in the parking lot in just a minute."

"Good. I just realized I shouldn't be on the phone in here. I'm probably scrambling their equipment as we speak."

"What kind equipment? Aren't you in the lobby?"

"Monitors, ventilators, that kind of thing. I'm in the infirmary. Mild concussion. See you in a moment, K-san."

11:00pm

"A moment" turned out to be a lie. The police medic wasn't done with him, which put my nerves into overdrive while I sat on a wooden bench with a handful of others waiting for their own police business to wrap up. A beleaguered mother, a young woman with an enormous engagement ring. Finally I heard footsteps I recognized from an echoing hallway, and the door swung open.

Tohma didn't even move towards me; he strolled directly to the door and motioned for me to come along. "If you wouldn't mind driving me to the office, K-san," he said without preamble. A couple pairs of eyes in the lobby flickered up to me, then back down.

I followed him out onto the sidewalk, towards the car. He was moving altogether more quickly than a concussed person should. "Tohma, you can't go back to the office."

"Of course not," he said, getting into the passenger seat. "Take me home."

I closed the door on my side and, just before the light dimmed above us, got a look at his face for the first time. "Good grief!" An angry-looking bruise covered a quarter of his forehead, spreading out from under his bangs, by his left eye and inward across his cheekbone. "You said you were fine!"

He winced at my volume. "See there? That's exactly the type of response I didn't want to deal with in the middle of the police station. I am fine. Could you please drive?"

Once more, I turned on the company Corolla and it hummed to life. "So… how bad was it?"

"Not very. You did good work getting to the front of that traffic line. Sakuma-san is grateful."

"Nevermind him. Did you…" I pictured Tohma trampled to the ground, pulled at from all sides by fans until somehow his head was kicked in. It made me feel sick. And it made feel like a failure in every capacity. I couldn't keep the tightness out of my voice. "Are you… hurt? Anywhere else?"

He looked over, a streetlight glow sliding over his bruised face as he considered me. "No, K-san." He sighed and looked forward. "The gentlemen acted fast when I told them Sakuma Ryuichi needed to escape through their roadblock. They recognized me, obviously. But it took a moment. By the time they got me to their police car, well." He was calm about the whole thing, impossibly settled. "I'm not entirely sure what happened."

Tuesday 7:45am

The next morning I turned on Tohma's television set – large, flat screen, audio to kill for, and almost entirely unused –and left it on mute. With some hundred or two hundred people causing a commotion (okay, so it was our commotion) on an otherwise slow night, I figured we'd hear something about it. And if the media did cover our mishap, Tohma needed to be ready to respond accordingly at the office. He already had a search alert for Nittle Grasper traffic jam programmed into his phone.

I was fiddling with a clementine when I glanced up and saw Ryuichi's face, a still from a concert, on the screen. "It's on, Tohma," I called, unmuting. He came in in a silk-blend undershirt, stretching an arm through the sleeve of a white dress button-down.

We'd missed whatever trite introduction the anchor had given, and watched as the channel replayed an internet video, some senseless attribution captioned at the bottom. It was a fan video titled "Chariro" belonging to "MUSIXFAN2001," a phone recording of the evening before. We watched, fascinated and mildly horrified, as the shaky video showed our car stopping a ways from the camera, then blocked from sight by other vehicles and people. The camera zoomed in, while the cameraman ran forward toward the roadlock, and then zoomed out again to capture Tohma, getting out of the Corolla like an idiot.

"There, you see?" I said to Tohma. "See what a moron you are?"

He couldn't argue with me. The audio on the video was indistinct but loud – people were shouting. The camera angled towards the ground for a moment while the camera holder ran, and then we saw the car – me, driving Ryuichi up onto the curb. An unsteady pan right and there was Tohma again, surprisingly fast and agile between the waiting cars, and then halting in front of the cops, and gesturing to the Corolla fifteen yards away.

Now, I glanced over at Tohma, who was distractedly buttoning the sleeves of his workshirt and cringing. He'd seen himself on video over and over, but nothing like this. The camera caught movement from the police, short and fuzzy, and then some dozen of the fastest crowd folk were upon Tohma. Shouts of his name.

A low police car door had been flung open for him, and at precisely the moment he stepped halfway in, a woman's arm reached forward and pulled hysterically at his arm. Another hand scrapped at his jacket. He only had one foot grounded as he was yanked down, sharp and fast. His head hit the top of the police car with a sound loud enough for the camera to catch over the noise of the fans.

"Shit," I said, almost in conjunction with the video-taker.

Tohma grimaced beside me. "I don't remember that at all," he said.

On-screen Tohma made no move to catch himself. The woman relinquished her grip on him, and the police moved in, using bodily force at last. The frenzy seemed to have gone from most of the crowd anyway – knocking the lights out a celebrity will do that. The video ended.

Tohma turned off the television set. There wasn't much need for analysis. He'd been wiped out.

"Chariro," he said, "is a four-day music festival held every spring."

"What, here in Tokyo?" It took a moment to sink in. "That's why there were swarms of people out on Monday. Some kind of after-party. That's why the parking garage was open. Hell, we were probably in event parking to begin with."

"And that's why they were particularly… fervent, in getting close to me and Sakuma-san." He lifted a hand to his face, testing the pain gingerly. Tohma's injury had darkened overnight. He would need to stop by the studio and find a make-up artist if he didn't want to spend the whole day answering questions. "I think now maybe I was lucky."

"That's one word for it," I snorted. But it was hard to berate the man now that I'd seen the video. He'd probably saved Ryuichi from far worse. Strictly speaking, he'd done a good thing. "We'll just have to be more careful in the future, that's all. And I'm definitely keeping an eye on you today, whether – "

"That won't be necessary." Tohma was continuing his morning routine, tying a black silk tie with quick, practiced movements. His fingers fumbled once and resumed.

" – Whether you like it or not. You hit the body of that cruiser full force. You don't even remember going down. Why the hell did you end up at the precinct? They should have taken you to the hospital."

"Because I strongly encouraged them not to." He made an aggravated sound, his tie an unexpected skewed mess. He yanked it off, shook out once as though it needed punishing, and started over. He folded the thick tail more carefully across and through the back loop. "I'm sure they had actual problems to… deal with…" Tohma's hands had stilled, and he glanced vacantly down at the knot he'd barely started. He brought the tie end through an opening – the wrong move.

"Tohma, do you need help?"

"I don't…" He slowly, vaguely attempted to keep going. He'd made a mess of it again. Then he looked up, confused. "I don't know what I'm doing."

A/N: Oh no, poor Tohma. If I can get my lazy self to write, this fic will be at least two chapters.