Disclaimer – Don't own Tekken.
This was originally meant to be a long one-shot, but I've decided to put it into chapters. It was originally meant to be a Halloween fic but it's changed a little from what I originally planned. And I had to get some of my old OTP Lei/Jun in somehow. Hopefully it has some reading value.
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Supplicate
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When the gun had gone off, Lei Wulong was neither here nor there in his head. His comrade had been shot, several times, in the chest and head and the bloody, punctured bag of his body had been crumbled at his feet. Of course, when the loaded ammunition had been discharged and the bullets had hurtled through his arm and shoulder, did pain strike in dull, tearing tremors and by the time he'd called for backup he'd long since lost consciousness.
The hospital is a dark place. An ancient military facility, he was told. It reminds him of an old base he was once stationed at in his home country. Just as dismal as this brick, it used to hold the broken bodies of the previous wars. When China opened its eyes and marched south, destroying their culture as they went with new voices and open minds. Now their history lies in rubble around them and there isn't a soul to be found who remembers the old ways. At least in Hong Kong there is enough noise and colour to distract from the mottled ground that is their countryside or the fact their crops are submerged in inky smoke courtesy of the Mishima Zaibatsu.
People have begun to swarm around the Government buildings, plying for a merciful surrender. But the national pride is too great. The Mishima can drop their bombs or mangle the ground or plunge people's lives into darkness. They shall stand tall.
Lei is away from China, away from Hong Kong, away from his station and the people who need him. Japan, now rebuilt from the brief, panicked uprising last year, is lush and green and terrifying. Every word spoken to him has been rehearsed. The people operate in tiny voiced choruses, never speaking out of line or too loud. The Mishima flag sways softly outside the hospital window. As the wind had blown it closer, he'd pulled down the window and tried to set it alight with his fallen friend's lighter. But it had fluttered away, peeling back from the weak stutter of the flame, and in the end he gave up.
His room is bare. Grey walls, grey everything. Even the outside is bizarrely uncluttered. Snow has fallen prematurely this year and smothered the summer's last lingering gasp of warmth.
Midnight. Biting cold. Horrible. Lei hates the cold. He used to train in it in his youth, in the vague hope of conquering it somehow. But it remained as heartless and close as any serial killer, so now he just ignores it and hopes spring comes soon.
He sits on his grey bed in his grey room and watches the shadows of snowflakes drift down the bandage on his arm. The bed clothes are wrapped around his knees in a desperate bid for heat.
A woman stands in the corner. Short black hair, layered to her shoulders. A criss cross of white headbands in her hair. A snowy jumpsuit.
He fumbles for his gun beneath the pillow. As soon as he retrieves it, he glances back, expecting full well that the mother of the world's monster will be gone. A mean spirited trick of the light. But there she stands, still. She has a sort of discreet, disturbing luminance etched around her face, her person, tumbling off her in smoky, soft waves of light.
Her gaze lowers to the gun.
"I don't know how you found your way here..." Always the apt, prepared police officer. It's a guise that at the moment he welcomes. "But you're walking on thin ice. You're more than just on the wanted list."
As she breathes, the bone white of her shoulders rise and fall. His finger compresses on the trigger. She takes a step further, out of the shade, into the dim stretch of orange light provided by the creaking bulb overhead. He'd hadn't noted it at first, since the pattern of her suit was hidden within the clutches of darkness, but a patterned swarm of black ravens unravel on her left trouser and finish in a inky swirl at her breast.
His mouth is dry at the sight of her. His own hair is loose, falling in a heavy, unkempt bundle down his back. Despite the freeze of the room, his chest is bare beneath the blankets, to spare the catch of material on his bandages. The pain has doused his skin in a sickly sweat.
He tries to remember what the old Jun would have said. She might have laughed and told him to put the gun down. A first class cop, but useless with the ladies. She might even have been serious and would have declared, in her firm voice (the one he always loved to hear, and would say it was a great voice for a police woman) that there was no reason to invoke violence. But this Jun, this woman, stands still and refuses, it seems, to tear her eyes from his.
"What do you want?" He keeps the gun high, and steady. "Make it quick."
She bows her head, observing the thin lines caught in the arch of her fingers. She wets her lips, her brow creasing slightly, before she raises her gaze, facing him fully. Her throat shifts as she swallows, but there is nothing nervous about the action. Carefully, she begins to move. Each gentle tread of her feet on the tiles explodes like gunshots in Lei's brain. The resolve he so prides himself on begins to waver, along with the weapon now shaking and unsteady in his hand.
"Speak," He thrusts the pistol forward, as if in warning. Undeterred, she stops short of its barrel. He shakes his head, as if trying to wade off a bad dream. "Why are you here?"
She lies on finger on the tip of the gun. Her thumb curls round and touches the end of his forefinger, rooted on the trigger.
"Lei..." Her words. Her voice. He never thought he would hear it again, no, ever see her again. Even if his associates had, in one surreal scenario, given him her file and a warning. "I need you to help me."
Her other hand is lain over his. It's a cool, smooth pressure on his skin. A shiver racks down his spine. It isn't right. Something seems to awaken, to shift, in the black within her irises. Sensing this, she pulls away and folds her hands in her lap.
"How did you get here?" He presses on. The gun is finally put to rest, between them. It's a temporary truce. His hushes his voice, but doesn't soften it. "You must realise that there are people looking for you, Jun."
"I wouldn't have come to any other person," Jun replies simply, but she is too strangely calm, too confident. "But I'm not what I was."
"What does that mean? I'm not that good of a detective."
The snow caresses the windows in tumbling lines of blurring white.
His tongue glides along the inside of his cheek. As he goes to look at her, once again, it's almost as if she is closer than she was a moment before. Jun touches the groves of her wrists, and then the pale flesh of her lips, toying with the edge of her mouth and then the blunt, white smoothness of her teeth, as if rediscovering herself. He can't believe that she's here, of all places, chosen him, sorely, of all people.
"Jun..." Lei fastens his hand on hers. She stills, suddenly alert, fretful, like a caged animal. "The world thinks you're dead."
The tameness evaporates as soon as it had appeared, and in its place, is that new, confusing composure.
"I was dead." She responds carefully. Her eyes cloud, as if deep in thought. "I remember it. I think I do. I must have done."
"Died, you mean?" There is a differing scent about her. It's strange, earthy, like the musty, sickly sweet rot of decay. He swallows. "But you're here."
"I'm here and I'm not," she whispers, and there is a sudden strike of fear, cruelly human, lashing across her face. She drops his hand as if it is a poisonous snake. He reaches for her then, suddenly awash with deja vu, but she presses back from his touch and slips, once more, into the shadows.
"I'm sorry," she says quickly. She has her back to him. The darkness from which she had first emerged seems to spread, curling across the ceiling and walls like murky tendrils of split treacle. "Forget this. Forget me."
He half topples from the bed in an attempt to follow her, but the corner is just another bare, grey, empty wall and the chill rejoices in diving into his skin and rising pimples on his arms.
"Jun...?"
A resounding echo is his only answer.