Being a Greeed had its perks. Sure, Ankh's senses were duller than a human's, but provided that he didn't come into contact with someone that could destroy medals, he was immortal. He hadn't contemplated the implications of it before his medal broke, but was brutally reminded when he opened his eyes for the first time in years.
The first thing he saw was Eiji, holding a hawk medal and looking like he was going to cry from joy. It was disgusting, and Ankh wanted to slap him for it. Something stayed his hand; it took him a moment to place the emotion-he had been numb emotionally and sensually in those years as a broken medal-but finally Ankh managed to put a word to the feeling. Shock. He was too shocked to assault Eiji, who seemed to have aged forty years since their battle with Maki. Logically, Ankh knew it had just taken a really, really long time to restore his medal, but his senses had been so distorted as a broken medal that-even possessing Eiji-he couldn't see the time that had passed.
Ankh wanted to scream. He wanted to grab his companion by the shoulders and shake him and ask him why he kept going and going and going for so many years; why didn't he settle down with Hina and have children and let Ankh fade into so many memories; why didn't you think of yourself for once-but Ankh already knew why. Eiji never thought of himself before others-hell, he probably still told people that all he needed in life was some spare change and tomorrow's underwear. He might even thank Ankh for giving him a reason to overcome his traumas to travel again.
Flooded by his torrent of newfound emotions, Ankh finally found his voice,
"E-Eiji, you..." And stuttered out what had to be the weakest response possible.
"Ah, well," Eiji made an apologetic smile. No, it was that same fucking smile he had when he suffered for someone else and got caught-the smile of a man that had no regrets about what he had done, only that he had made you worry about him. A smile that was exactly as Ankh remembered it. "Bringing you back took a little longer than I thought." A little? That was a gross understatement if Ankh had ever heard one.
"You moron." Ankh still couldn't manage to put force in his words, making Eiji beam at him.
Sitting up, Ankh examined his surroundings. It distracted him from Eiji's unexpected appearance, but not for long. The room was white and crammed with machinery and artifacts that Ankh understood none of. He knew, however, that it had been used to not only fix his medal, but to make nine more; he could feel nine cores inside him, and Eiji was holding his tenth medal. The urge to rip it out of Eiji's hand and finally be complete tempted him, but to be complete was also to no longer be-otherwise, why had he not woken up with ten medals? Why had Eiji seen fit to remove one? No, Ankh was-as strange as it was to say-satisfied with nine medals. To live was to want, and what Ankh wanted was to live.
Eiji took him home, after that-to the Cous Coussier, of all places. Really, had anything changed since Ankh left? As they entered the cafe, the answer was surprisingly "yes"; the people taking orders and making food were strangers, in their teens or twenties, from the looks of it. Eiji waved one over, a mousey looking kid, roughly in his twenties, with dark features and sharp eyes-he seemed familiar, even though Ankh knew better. The boy listened to Eiji obediently and gave the Greeed a split-second visual inspection before leaving to fetch Chiyoko.
The boy emerged from the back of the store, Chiyoko right behind him. Ankh watched, amused, as the store owner made a detour to the kitchen-it caught the boy off guard, leaving him clearly unsure whether to follow his boss or return to his waiting guests. Chiyoko emerged before he could decide, leaving him to step quickly or be left standing awkwardly in front of the kitchen. Ankh felt a warm smile spread across his face-it felt weird, but he couldn't bring himself to suppress it. He tried turning it into a wry smirk, but he was pretty sure he was fooling no one.
Ankh's suspicion was confirmed when Chiyoko began fawning over him, stroking his hair, examining his face-if anything, age had made her spunkier. Ankh let her have her way—he knew exactly what she was holding behind her back. Sure enough, she produced an ice pop and handed it to him. Ankh wasted no time in mercilessly ripping off the wrapper and biting off a large portion. Oh god, it was even one of the blue ones-she had remembered his favorite, even after all these years. He heard Eiji chuckle fondly, probably at some expression Ankh wasn't aware he was making, but Ankh didn't care; his universe was too busy occupying his mouth.
Eiji then made the mistake of trying to introduce the kid while Ankh was still eating. The boy's name wasn't "blue ice pop", and so Ankh immediately forgot it. Chiyoko let the boy go back to work, and Eiji continued on about the kid. Ankh felt a twinge of regret about not remembering his name, as he cleaned the last of the ice pop off the stick-the boy was Shingo's son, an only child. He looked familiar because he resembled his father, who left him an orphan when he died in the line of duty-Shingo's wife had passed away during childbirth. Moreover, he-not Eiji-was occupying Chiyoko's back room.
As Ankh discovered after lunch, Eiji lived with Hina and their two children—when they weren't travelling, at least. Eiji was a little too eager to tell a monster about his offspring, Ankh thought as they travelled to Eiji's apartment. Apparently they had a boy—named after Hina's brother—and a girl with some arbitrary name they had fallen in love with during their travels. Only the girl had inherited Hina's freakish strength, much to no one's surprise, and like his namesake, Shingo was somehow able to endure it. When they arrived at the apartment, Ankh found that Hina had stocked the freezer appropriately in celebration, allowing him to tune out some of Eiji's chatter.
Ankh opted to take a stroll that night, just to feel the wind on his face and the ice pop in his mouth. He stopped at a park, perching cross-legged on a bench to lick his frozen treat and pretend that he hadn't noticed Eiji following him. His aged companion sat next to him anyway, and after watching a few people walk by, struck up a conversation.
"Hey, Ankh… Do you think I did the right thing?"
"With what."
"Giving Kougami the ability to make core medals."
Ankh let out a derisive snort, "You mean, 'was it a good idea to revive me'?"
Eiji caved, letting out a chuckle of his own, "not what I meant, but I guess it's the same thing."
They watched a few more people walk past, Ankh licking his ice pop in silence. The feeling that he had forgotten to do something important had been nagging him all day. It was worse with Eiji around, but Ankh still hadn't been able to figure out what he was forgetting—only that it had to do with the time he spent as two halves of a medal. Eiji interrupted his thoughts again.
"New Greeed might be born tonight, actually." Born, not created. Ankh savored the word. "Kougami thinks cores can be created and used without making a Greeed, but…" Ankh glanced over at the human—Eiji's expression was one preparing to fight. Ankh frowned—taking on a full-powered Greeed with that body would be little more than suicide. Moreover, even in the prime of his life, Eiji needed the power of the purple medals to handle a fully-revived Greeed.
"So you came out here, thinking you could stop a swarm of Greeed if something went wrong."
Eiji let out an uneasy laugh, "It's better than not doing anything."
Eiji heard the screams before Ankh did, leaping off the bench and running to their source with a surprising amount of agility for his age. The Greeed kicked himself mentally as he sprinted after, haphazardly discarding his mostly-eaten treat—had it been the other way around, he could have stopped Eiji. By the time he caught up, Eiji was at the edge of the soon-to-be-battlefield, wearing the OOO driver with Ankh's tenth medal already in it. He was helping the innocents evacuate, but hollered Ankh's name as soon as he saw the Greeed, making a gesture indicative of "throw me some medals". Ankh made a disapproving noise—he had finally been fully revived—but if he refused, he knew Eiji would run into the Greeed-infested slaughter-zone anyway. With a grimace, he threw the two remaining cores needed to transform at the rider—hopefully he could still handle a combo, because that was all Ankh could give him.
The moment the medals left his hand, he felt the city lights plunge to dull hazes, the voices around him sounding like so many cheap radios—he had expected this, but that didn't make the disgruntled void in him any more complacent about it. Even though he could barely feel the wind on his face, he ran past Eiji to enter the battle first. Ankh had been so focused on preventing Eiji from doing something stupid that he hadn't looked at his opponents—and the surprise of who he was fighting almost earned him a claw in the face. Kazari, Mezool, Gamel—his old comrades were mixed in with the new Greeed. Not quite, he thought as "Kazari" growled and took another swing—the Kazari he knew would have had an arsenal of insults and verbal abuse primed for a fight—primal noises had long since been beneath him.
As their desperate battle progressed, Ankh was rudely reminded that he was in no place to criticize Eiji's decision to fight with his run-down body. Fighting several full-powered Greeed while only having seven medals himself was just as painful of an idea. He had significantly more experience in fighting, however, which allowed him to hold his own despite the circumstances. Eiji, on the other hand, seemed to be at his limits. Ankh caught sight of what looked like a Birth user, and it seemed like the tide of the fight would turn in their favor—until the Birth was knocked aside violently by "Gamel". They weren't the only Birth, nor were they the only rider, but it didn't make a difference—none of them knew how to handle a Greeed in combat, and it showed.
Ankh knocked "Mezool" into one of the new Greeeds, giving him enough time to spare a glance back to Eiji's fight. Every cell medal in his body rejected what he saw. In that moment, Ankh's vision wasn't distorted enough—he could still see Eiji's blood running down the arm of the Greeed that impaled him and the way it shone on the claws sticking out of his back. He could still make out the weakening movement of Eiji's fingers as he tried to pull the claws out of his gut, even as his legs hung limply in the air, gravity completely against him. At the same time, Ankh's muffled senses were cruel, burning into his mind the sickly shade of red of the blood pool expanding on the ground, like a faded and molding carpet—once a deep, warm color now reduced to a terminal hue.
Ankh expected his voice to come out in an animalistic scream—instead, he couldn't so much as open his mouth. No, his raw emotions found another route out—a brutal hellfire that swirled around him menacingly, piercing the newborn Greeed with instinctual fear. The target of Ankh's bloodthirsty glare stood his ground, however, holding the older Greeed's gaze as he dumped Eiji on the ground with a casual twist of his arm. It was too much for Ankh, and Ankh's fire was too much for the newcomer. The Greeed didn't burn so much as explode, medals launching over the pavement like so much shrapnel.
The remaining Greeed scattered—they had no allegiance to each other, after all. Ankh could care less that they were loose in the city—Eiji would, but whether Eiji was alive was questionable—his transformation was broken, and the pool of blood he lay in wasn't getting any smaller. He crossed to Eiji's side, dropping to the ground and—deep down—hoping desperately that he wasn't too late. He grabbed one of Eiji's limp hands and brushed the hair from the rider's face—Ankh probably couldn't find a pulse under normal circumstances—hoping his friend could still weakly move a finger or open his eyes was all he had. Eiji managed it, though—despite the pain and blood loss, he looked up at Ankh and smiled. In that moment, it was like having Hina crushing his core medals—this was the person that had first treated him as a living being, that had taught him to be human, that had wandered the world for years for his sake—and for what? To die the same day he succeeded? To be killed in cold blood by the fruits of his own efforts? No, not if Ankh had anything to do with it.
He closed his eyes and let his body dissolve, the medals falling in a gentle cascade, rebounding in the blood on the pavement, sliding effortlessly into the open wounds, integrating themselves with their new body. Cautiously, he opened his eyes, feeling out his new body—he had succeeded—he had pulled Eiji from the clutches of death, in the same way Eiji had freed him from a medal on the verge of disintegration.
As he picked himself off the ground. Ankh marveled at how Eiji had managed to fight with his body—every joint was stiff, nothing wanted to move, and laying back down in that pool of blood for the rest of the night seemed like a great idea. A more malicious and vengeance-oriented idea motivated him to put one foot in front of the other, find, and pick up the core medals of the Greeed that Ankh had scattered across the area. A small voice nagged that his plan—to destroy the newborn by assimilating his medals—was murder. Ankh brushed off the small fragment of Eiji's consciousness—he was going to be stuck in this run-down excuse of a body for at least a year—he had a say in this, too.
Ankh took two of the medals from the OOO driver and returned them to his body, along with three of the new medals. Restored to full power, he found the new medals' dark fuchsia color to be rather striking. Again, a nagging feeling of regret tugged at him. Ankh made a disgusted face in response—of the three medals he absorbed, none had a consciousness anyway. Instead, he started the journey back to Eiji's apartment.
Hina took the news rather well—at this point, Ankh was convinced she was unphasable, and Eiji's consciousness and memories only affirmed this fact. Chiyoko, similarly, took it in stride, and Ankh spent most of a year lounging around the apartment and the café and having his diet strictly managed by Chiyoko and Hina. The feeling he needed to do something nagged at him, however, and he took to occasionally wading through Eiji's memories for the answer.
Ankh had returned to the park, toying with a fuchsia medal as he skimmed memories; he had assimilated all except this one, and now the Greeed's consciousness sat harmlessly in his hand, spared by Eiji. It slipped from his fingers the same moment he stumbled on the memory he needed—an event that required Ankh's presence. Strangely, the memory was fogged over with the passage of time—yet Ankh was there—only a year after his medal had been broken.
As he retrieved the dropped medal, the back of his thoughts notified him to the presence of a pair of Greeed a few blocks away. Ankh brushed it off—even if he wanted to fight, it was impossible with this body. Eiji pestered him about it when he tried to dive back into the memory, however—the feeling claimed Ankh needed to check out the Greeed, even if he didn't fight. Ankh poised himself to stuff Eiji back into unconsciousness—pestering Ankh was a privilege, not a right—when the presence of three more Greeed materialized in the same location. Cautiously, he headed toward the Greeed—as he did so, the power levels of the first two plummeted—something was definitively awry with this situation.
Ankh stayed out of sight when he arrived, peering around a corner to check the locations of the Greeed. The first two were injured—one struggling to pick himself off the ground and the other maintaining a nervous distance from their aggressor. Ankh narrowed his eyes skeptically at the situation—aggressor—singular, not plural, and yet he still sensed a total of five Greeed, three of which were theoretically the teenage twerp holding the other two at bay. He inspected the kid from afar—his only distinctive characteristics were a blue stripe in his hair and what could only be a rider belt around his waist. More noticeable was the vortex off to his side; Eiji's memories crashed into focus—he knew the vortex, just as he knew the blue-striped kid's name was Michal. This was what Ankh was supposed to do—use the vortex to travel through time, to a year after his medal broke.
Ankh lashed back—Eiji's body still couldn't survive without a Greeed's possession—his age and the severity of his injuries had made his recovery much slower than Shingo's. Still, Eiji's memories prodded, he would die in the past if Ankh wasn't there to save him—Eiji wouldn't be able to become OOO, and the Greeed possessing Michal would kill him, Gotou, and Date with ease. Consequently, Ankh wouldn't be revived, and this future would probably cease to exist.
Michal—or rather, the Greeed possessing him—leapt into the vortex. Eiji threw his consciousness at Ankh's, futilely trying to force the Greeed out. Ankh retaliated with his frustration, but he couldn't argue against the facts—instead, he formed another plan, extracting the relevant memories from Eiji. He split off the minimum number of cell medals that Eiji would need, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the fuchsia medal. Pressing it to Eiji's chest, he absorbed it—not into his own existence, but in the human body he inhabited. Using Eiji's murderer to prevent his death was sickeningly ironic, but Ankh was out of options.
Ankh separated himself from the rider—he had no guarantee that this half-baked plan would work, and so he didn't look back as he followed Michal into the portal.