Not my world, just my playground.

In Search of A Smoke

Damn, he needed a smoke.

Who the hell had thought it was a good idea to ban smoking from hospital campuses, anyway? Didn't they realize that in stressful situations – like those likely to crop up in hospital waiting rooms – people needed a fucking cigarette?

His hand hurt, and he cringed as he realized that his death grip on the arm of his chair had left an indelible handprint around the steel. Quickly laying Ginji's green vest over the arm to cover the damage, which he had neither the cash nor the inclination to pay for, he scowled at the unoffending piece of clothing.

That idiot.

He was so damn selfless, so damn noble. And if it didn't kill Ginji in the next twenty-four hours, Ban was positive his own aggravation with it would be the death of him.

It was supposed to be a routine job – get the stolen vial back. But since Hevn had been the one to bring it to their attention, they'd been pretty certain that somewhere along the way, there would be a few snags. To be fair, Hevn hadn't known the real dangers of the assignment – her employers hadn't dared release the truth, even to their own negotiator.

Four days prior, a vial containing a 'hazardous material' had been stolen from a bioengineering company based in Osaka. The thieves were suspected to have fled to Tokyo. Embarrassed about the breach in security, the company had chosen to hire private retrievers to handle the matter quietly.

What no one had bothered to tell Hevn – and, consequently, the Get Backers – was that the thieves were part of a North Korean terrorist organization and that the 'hazardous material' they had stolen was in fact a deadly, biologically engineered virus. If he'd known that, he wouldn't have touched the case with a ten foot pole. Firstly, it was way, way too big an assignment to tackle, unless one had the backing of a government agency. Secondly, there was no reason an artificially designed virus should have been developed anywhere in Japan – certainly no reason it should have been kept outside a government-sponsored disease control center. Unless the experimentation itself had been a covert government operation, in which case the government would be relying on its own resources to retrieve it.

No, there had been a lot of loose ends. A private entity in Japan was developing biological weapons, and one of them had been stolen by terrorists. And Hevn had walked herself and the Get Backers right into the middle of it.

Ban had dealt with it, of course. There was a whole city block in Tokyo that was probably still burning, but the fire was about all he could distinctly remember. Ginji had gone down, and Ban couldn't recall much that had happened after that.

Threadspool had been there, somehow, and he wouldn't let him touch Ginji. He had forced him wait for so-called professionals in orange coveralls and masks to take him away, and, before they arrived, had relied on his strings to pull Ginji's body away from the ever-spreading fire. Looking down at the burns on his hands, his own injuries suddenly demanded his attention, throbbing angrily beneath his burnt skin. The other one, the hanger-on, he'd tried to get Ban to let him bandage the burns. Ban had cursed him and walked away, and even now refused to look at Ginji's assorted Kings and friends who had gathered in the waiting room.

He must have looked absolutely pathetic, if even Fuyuki couldn't summon the hostility to blame him for Ginji's predicament.

Not that he could have argued the point. No, he knew exactly whose fault it was that Ginji was lying in some cold white hospital bed, sick, alone, probably dreaming up some ridiculous fantasy or other, probably something involving ice cream or rainbows or unicorns or something equally inane…

Ban suddenly couldn't catch his breath, and he thrust himself up from his chair, knocking Ginji's vest aside and frightening the old lady next to him. Across the room, he felt Hevn's eyes flicker up at him and quickly fall to the floor again.

Oh, hell. It wasn't her fault. After picking up the vest, he strode over to stand beside her.

"Stop that, Hevn. You didn't know." He couldn't make his voice any gentler; it would have broken.

"I should have guessed – I did guess…" Her voice faltered.

"I could have turned around and walked away as soon as I realized what we were dealing with. I didn't. Not your fault," he repeated shortly. "Did they contact you?"

"Not since they first called to tell me they were working on an antivirus." Her voice cracked with exhaustion, with fear. "I've called them three times since then, but no one will pick up."

Shido, who sat two chairs down from Hevn, swore under his breath. Madoka had positioned herself at his feet, so she could be closer to Mozart, and she settled an unobtrusive hand on his knee to comfort him. Some of the strain disappeared from his shoulders. He didn't look at Ban.

"Ginji-kun is going to be okay, isn't he?" Natsumi asked, face shining with tears. It was the fourth time she'd asked, and, like every time before, no one felt like lying to her. Rena settled an arm around her, but said nothing.

It would have been better if there were anything he could do – anything, even if it was just beating up the bad guys, even if it was just searching aimlessly for an antivirus.

But there wasn't one. The only stock of it had been in the warehouse in Tokyo, and every bit of it had burned to the ground. And Ban knew the odds against developing a new one in time were phenomenal.

He handed Ginji's vest to Hevn. "Watch this."

With everyone's eyes boring holes in the back of his head, he abandoned Ginji's friends and left the waiting room.

He'd intended to make his way across the street, where he could light up, for one, but also where he could get away from that awful antiseptic smell and those damned people who cared more than he wanted to know, more than they liked to admit. But as he walked down the corridor toward the main entrance of the hospital, a small white sign with engraved, navy blue letters indicated the twin doors that led to the hospital chapel. Much to his own consternation, he found himself hesitating outside the simple room. Shrugging, not one to question his own instincts, he stepped inside.

There was no way to identify the chapel as belonging to one religion or another. A single row of pews with an aisle along either side faced a stained glass window portraying a rising sun – or, Ban thought with a chill, a sunset. There were no crosses, no icons, no Buddhas. A pair of small bookshelves on the back wall between the doors held a few Bibles and a Qur'an, along with a number of Judaic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Shinto religious texts. Despite himself, Ban smiled a bit, thinking he would have liked to have met the person responsible for this room.

Then he frowned, because he couldn't think of any religion he'd like to be attached to that welcomed witches or cursed people, and he started to retreat from the chapel.

A small woman with dark hair blocked his way, and a sudden jolt of recognition shivered down his spine. Her eyes widened slightly, evidently in surprise, and he saw with a shock that her eyes were not the same color; one was a brilliant blue, the other an equally vibrant lavender.

"Midou Ban-san?" There was something familiar about her low, lilting voice as well, but he couldn't place it.

"Can I help you?" he asked curtly, in no mood for idle chit-chat.

"Yes, as a matter of fact, but we must discuss that later. For the moment, I am here to help you." She held up a syringe full of a viscous green liquid.

Scarcely thinking, he lunged at her, straining for the antivirus, only to find she wasn't where he thought she was.

"You need not fight me for it, Midou-san. I came to administer it to your friend myself. We shall work out an appropriate payment later."

Somehow she had appeared before the stained glass window, an easy fourteen feet away, but he hadn't seen the movement. He ran his eyes over her slight frame, lingering on her oddly mismatched eyes, searching for something to indicate falsity, but detected nothing.

"The virus that has infected your friend will reproduce in another hour, and will have mutated sufficiently to resist this particular antivirus." She'd taken on a pointed tone, and he nodded mutely, acknowledging the need for haste.

"I suppose he has been secreted away in some kind of quarantine area?"

Again Ban nodded, still not quite believing his ears.

"Typical cover-up." She shrugged. "Do you know where he is?"

"He's on the top floor, under heavy guard." At last his voice acquiesced to his wishes.

"Is that going to be a problem?" she asked with a slight smile.

"No."

And of course it wasn't. Guns could be dangerous, but only if the people aiming them at you were faster on the trigger than you were on your feet, and so far Ban hadn't met anyone who could aim and shoot more quickly than he could remove himself from their line of sight.

Getting to the top story should have been troublesome, as the elevator required a pass code to stop on restricted floors. However, she pressed the key for the top floor and entered a few numbers on the keypad, and the elevator dutifully brought them to the thirty-eighth floor. Two guards shouted when they emerged from the compartment; he went for one and she for the other, and then she had disappeared. Moving down the corridors toward the quarantine wing, he was assaulted by perhaps another dozen guards. He left them slumped against the walls and was curiously unsurprised to find another ten or so laid out on the floor. She beat him to the quarantine wing and was scanning the patient register that hung on a clipboard outside the sealed metal door.

"Stay here." She reached for the door, but Ban grabbed the handle first.

"You know there's some kind of alarm connected to this, right?" he demanded. "And there's no way you're leaving me behind, lady. I don't have any reason to trust you."

"The alarm has been dealt with," she answered, a steely note in her tone. "And unless you have suddenly become an expert on precautionary measures pertaining to biosafety level four agents, I suggest you remain here. I did not bring two doses of the antivirus, and even if I had, there are more patients in here, with other, equally dangerous and contagious conditions."

Unhappy but helpless to argue the point, he scowled and rested against the wall, silently deferring to her.

"I will not be long." So saying, she pulled open the door and disappeared behind it. Ban dropped into a crouch beside the wall. The Get Backer's capacity for adjusting to change and his ability to adapt to unstable situations constituted a great part of his battle genius, but even he felt a little overwhelmed by the sudden alteration of his circumstances. One minute he had been wallowing in guilt, the next he was standing outside the quarantine wing of Tokyo's finest hospital, waiting for a total stranger to tell him Ginji was going to be alright.

Having a moment to himself, he allowed his thoughts to reform the woman in his mind. Nothing about her figure caught his attention, other than that it was fine-boned and attractive, so he tried picturing her face, tried to capture whatever it was that had struck him as familiar.

Heart-shaped, broad forehead, narrow, pointed chin. Pert nose, upturned just a little. Generous mouth, rather thin-lipped. Fine eyebrows, severely angled over intense eyes with heavy black lashes.

It was the eyes, had to be, because just imagining them felt like a blow to the stomach. He tried to see them more clearly in his mind. After a moment, he stood up and sought his reflection in the shining steel door.

If both of her eyes had been the vivid blue of her left, they would have been identical to his.

Suddenly the door swung open, and caught Ban full in the face, sending him sprawling backward.

The woman with his eyes frowned, rather like a school teacher who had been presented with a naughty child. "Whatever are you doing on the floor, Midou-san?"

"Who are you?" he demanded, disregarding her question.

The frown faded. "It would be best to retire to less public quarters before posing that particular question, Midou-san." She offered a hand to help him up. He ignored it and clambered to his feet.

"There is a bar on sixth. Once you have laid your fears for Amano-san to rest, do come. I will be there until eight o'clock this evening." She gestured to the elevator down the hall. "Some haste is probably in order," she commented, and allowed him to lead the way.

She exited the elevator cab first, and by the time Ban followed her, she was nowhere to be seen.

Leaving the elevator and the waiting room and the quarantine wing behind, Ban ambled along the hallway to the main entrance of the hospital. It faced the corner of two streets, and, fortunately for Ban, sat on the very edge of the hospital campus. The digital sign across the street blinked the temperature and time. 17.7 degrees Celsius. 10:07.

He crossed with a small crowed of other pedestrians and stood beneath the blinking sign, staring up at the top floor of the hospital, remembering his reflection in the steel, and the face that had materialized seconds later.

Then he lit up.