All Possible Worlds, Part 1; chapter 7 of 8: In which Bakura and Ryou Get Back Something for Nothing!
Author: Tsutsuji
Rating: PG13
Warnings: A little language, shonen ai (m/m romance), a bit of angst here and there.
Disclaimer: Tsutsuji doesn't own these guys and doesn't get paid for this. (Full Disclaimer at the start of Chapter 1.)
Chapter Summary: Old friends and adversaries meet again, and it's Bakura vs the Transporters, round 2!
Something for Nothing, Chapter 7
Himiko stared out through the bars of the steel dome, still wondering how the hell it had materialized so solidly around them, and how long it would take to disappear - if their crazy, white-haired opponent was telling the truth, that is. If he wasn't, she didn't know how they were going to get out of something that even Dr. Jackal's blades couldn't cut and her perfumes didn't affect. If this was magic, it was not like any she'd seen before.
She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end before she saw the flutter of white in the darkness. Without knowing why, she yelled a warning and tried to push Akabane back from the bars of the cage, but he had already leapt away from them as well. She thought she heard Dr. Jackal swear nervously under his breath, which shocked her even more than anything else she'd seen so far.
The strip of paper flew up and clung to the bars for a moment, fluttering like an aggressive butterfly. Somehow Himiko could sense the battle between the two magics, but it only lasted for a heartbeat. The fuda burst into flame that consumed the cage; both bars and paper dissolved into dust and shadow, leaving nothing but the ozone-sweet tang of magic in the air.
She was a little relieved to see that Jackal was smiling again. That shouldn't bode well for the two men walking toward them, but her hair stood on end again. She'd never seen them before; they looked perfectly ordinary, but there was something entirely unnatural about them.
"My, my, Kuroudou-san!" the taller man smiled. "I never expected to see you caught in a magical trap! And no bodies lying on the ground, no blood soaking the pavement - does that mean we were called here prematurely?"
Himiko had to remind herself that this man was probably an enemy and almost certainly not an ordinary human. With his smile and his unruly brown hair and intriguing, violet-colored eyes, he was one of the most beautiful men she'd ever seen. He was also one of the very few people she'd ever known to call Dr. Jackal by his given name, and that as much as the strange aura around him made her wary.
"Ah, Asato Tsuzuki-san! What a surprise! I see you have yet another new partner," Akabane said smoothly. "That makes, let's see, how many since we first met?"
"Tsuzuki?" the partner in question said, obviously baffled by this familiar exchange. Himiko felt equally astonished, if not more so.
"Hisoka, meet Kuroudou Akabane, also known as Dr. Jackal," the violet-eyed man said. "They say he has his own index in the Kiseki, he's sent so many souls to the Afterlife. It looks like a false alarm this time, though, doesn't it!"
Hisoka stared at him. "What are you talking about?"
It was Tsuzuki's turn to look puzzled. Himiko could do nothing more than listen to all of this, speechless.
"The reason Chief Konoe sent us here to Shinjuku, of course," Tsuzuki shook his head with a little roll of his eyes. "Didn't he explain? It's happened before. Kuroudou-san gets a little carried away sometimes, and for some reason the Shinigami for this district don't like to deal with him. So they send me." He spread his hands and shrugged with a grin that clearly said it's embarrassing but what else can you do? His partner's expression sent another message entirely.
"Baka!" Hisoka cried. "These guys have nothing to do with it! We're not here because of anything in the Kiseki! We're just here to find - a file." He caught himself and hesitated, but then he frowned and pushed on as if he'd said too much to stop now.
"It's one of Dr. Satomi's files, Tsuzuki," he said in a much lower voice; if Himiko didn't know what he was talking about already, she wouldn't have been able to make out the name he mentioned. "The Chief didn't want to send anyone else because - well, because of what's in the file."
He stared hard at Tsuzuki, obviously determined not to spell everything out for him, with a quick scowl at herself and Jackal. Clearly he wished they were further out of earshot, but Himiko didn't bother to pretend she wasn't listening to every word. Tsuzuki stared back at his partner and Himiko saw something in his expression change; the smile disappeared and the light in his eyes went dim. Hisoka winced as if the sudden lack of expression on his partner's face hit him like a physical force.
"Satomi..." Tsuzuki said softly. "That man ... the one Muraki was working with."
"You know Muraki killed him," Hisoka muttered quickly, "but he left behind information on the research they were doing. Someone stole the information and brought it here to Tokyo. Chief Konoe sent us to get it back. We're not here to summon any souls for judgment or track down any unusual deaths, this time."
Himiko watched and listened with her mind starting to reel. Summoning souls to judgment? Shinigami? She shuddered with the realization. That would explain the strange aura she sensed from them. It gave her little clue to their powers, though, and it didn't explain why they were so interested in this file they were transporting to an unknown client. She saw Akabane's smile twitch as he listened in as well.
"Is this interesting enough for you now, Dr. Jackal?" she said, bitingly.
"Oh, it's become quite interesting. In fact, this makes it even more unfortunate that those other two were able to get away with the file - doesn't it, Tsuzuki-san? They were fairly entertaining after all, but we could have had so much more fun if you'd gotten here first! I wonder if your new partner is as powerful as you are? That would have made our battle for possession of the file in question so entertaining!"
"What," Hisoka gasped. He turned to stare directly at them for the first time.
Tsuzuki blinked in surprise. The baffled, slightly hurt look on his face was almost comical. "Kuroudo-san!"
"You two have Satomi's file?" Hisoka gasped. "You're the couriers the Chief mentioned! But, wait - the he someone else was interested in them too. Are you saying you two had them, but you lost them?"
"Unfortunately, but it's only a matter of time before we find them and get them back," Akabane said calmly. "Our anonymous client is apparently very interested in Dr. Satomi's research, for some reason...and so, it seems, are these others, whom I believe have a rather more personal motivation."
Akabane and Tsuzuki stared at each other, speculative and challenging. To Hisoka's obvious distress and Himiko's relief , Tsuzuki backed down first with a sigh.
"Akabane-san," he said quietly. "I hate to call in a favor on an old friend, but it would make us more than even if you help us get those files back from whoever stole them from you. "
"Hmm..." Akabane cocked his head to the side, thinking about it.
Himiko couldn't believe this. It was hard enough to imagine Dr. Jackal owing a favor to anyone, but to an old friend who just happened to be a Shinigami - an angel of death? No matter who or what they were, though, she couldn't let these two interfere with the delivery.
"We have a job to do, Jackal," she reminded him. "And we're starting to run late. You're not planning to simply turn the files over to them?"
"Not 'simply,' Lady Poison." He gazed at Tsuzuki with that glitter he only got in his eyes when he saw a golden-red opportunity for what might be the ultimate challenge to his skill.
"Akabane-san," Tsuzuki sighed, looking weary and again, hurt. "I don't want to fight with you!"
"Maybe we should find the files first, and argue about it later?" Hisoka suggested impatiently. "Who took them from you, anyway? Some couriers you turned out to be..." He muttered under his breath.
Himiko fumed; she had a fine urge to choke the kid for that - if you could choke a Shinigami, that is - but Jackal only smiled. That was one of the downsides to working with him, of which there were few; far from taking it personally if they were bested by an opponent, he only took on jobs in order to find worthy opponents, and on the rare occasions when he found someone who might be "interesting" enough, the job was likely to take a back seat to his interest in their enemy. This was turning into one of those times.
"Regretably, we didn't catch their names," Jackal said, "but it will be easy enough to track them down - isn't that right, Lady Poison? You placed your Tracking Perfume on the documents as well as the case, I trust?"
Himiko looked sidelong at the Shinigami, but nodded. "It won't take long to find them at all. They can't have gone far," she added.
Then again, she thought uncomfortably, with the magic they were using, they might have gone anywhere in the world - or some other world entirely, for all she knew.
Bakura let instinct guide him; even in an unfamiliar city, he knew a safe place to rest when he saw it. Ryou was so preoccupied and weary after the adrenaline of the battle wore off that he didn't object when Bakura simply said "Here," and stopped. He also didn't object in the least when Bakura handed him some rice cakes from his jacket pocket. Ryou fished in his backpack for a couple of the juice cartons he'd brought along and handed one to Bakura. After their trip to America and encounter with Drakken, they'd learned to keep a few things on hand in case of unexpected hold ups and missed meals.
They were sitting in a little park, on a bench that was shadowed by a bank of rhododendron bushes, just out of the glare of the overhead lights. There was enough light, though, for them to read the printed pages in Dr. Satomi's files. Ryou leaned against him, reading over his shoulder and shivering a little until Bakura put his arm around him and pulled him closer.
Bakura frowned as frustration set in. He could see the writing perfectly well, but most of the words didn't make much sense to his mind. What's all this crap? he griped through his mental link with Ryou, hoping to hear something that made sense in Ryou's thoughts.
"It's medical terminology, I guess," Ryou said, squinting at the pages full of laboratory reports and technical descriptions of procedures. "I can't tell for sure; anatomy and physiology isn't exactly my best subject, but it sounds like he was actually trying to clone a human heart! That's what most of the terms I recognize refer to, anyway, although it mentions other organs as well."
They leaned over the pages together for some time, ignoring the occasional couple who wandered by, stared hopefully at the sheltered, secret bench for awhile, and then wandered away again in search of some other private place. Bakura spared the last of them a glare. That was the problem with private, secret resting places, he reflected - lovers always found them first. He couldn't blame them for trying. If he wasn't so busy trying to stay alive, he'd rather be doing what they wanted to do! Soon enough, he told himself, pulling Ryou closer.
Bakura read what he could and gleaned more from Ryou's hesitant thoughts, but two things became clear before long. For one thing, in spite of the rumors, there was nothing to indicate that Satomi had grown any more than individual human organs from the cells he cloned, and for another thing, he had not been satisfied with the results of his experiments. Everything he created, died.
Ryou sighed, leaning his head against Bakura's arm. "After all we've been through to get it, this isn't very much use to us after all, is it?"
"There must be more than this," Bakura muttered, shuffling through the sheets of paper. "He must have made some kind of progress. Why else would someone be interested enough in this crap to hire those two?"
He wasn't ready to give up on Satomi yet. Especially, he thought, shutting his mind away from Ryou's, after what he'd discovered in that battle with the Transporters. He let Ryou lean against him, knowing how worn out he must feel after the rush and tension of the entire day, but the truth was, he hardly felt any more energetic himself. Casting Shadow magic had never taken this much out of him before. He tried to convince himself it was only because of the unexpectedly different form of magical power, or whatever it should be called, that the Transporters had within themselves. He couldn't fathom the source of it for either of them, but something had been able to resist the effects of his Card Monsters much more effectively than he ever would have expected.
However, he knew that wasn't the entire reason he felt bone weary, nearly as weak as his host body used to be when he'd first awakened, after Ryou became the new owner of the Ring. He had his own magic, apart from what he could call upon from the dark power of the Ring, but he'd just discovered the hard way that it was limited by this body that wasn't truly his own. The body Drakken made, even though it was made from Ryou's resilient essence, did not have the stamina to channel and use such magic without damage. He'd have to remember not to piss Yuugi off too much, he thought irritably; this body would never survive a direct attack from a God Card!
However, he was already recovering his strength after the duel, restoring the Ba-energy that was represented by "Life Points" in the non-magical version of a Shadow Game. Unfortunately, his strength was returning far more slowly than he could remember it ever returning before, even after the intense battles he'd waged against the Yugi's Other Self and Marik's dark side. Then, his power had only been limited by the vulnerability of Ryou's' body, which he'd been able to augment with his own spiritual power and that of the Ring - although he had used less of the dark magic of the Millennium item and more of his own as time went on, as he had become attached to Ryou and less willing to expose him to the Ring's ultimate darkness.
Now, he could only call on the Ring's power through contact with Ryou, and he was still not willing to do so any more than absolutely necessary. He'd begun to turn away from that evil will the moment he'd made the decision to protect his host from mental and spiritual destruction when they were trapped together in the Shadow Realm, and he'd rejected it for good a short time later, when he'd been given a glimpse of a reality that might have been, if his own soul had not been lured so far into the darkness.
He wouldn't turn back to that now, even if it was the only thing that would keep this body alive. That meant he had to hold on to the hope that Satomi's research had found a way to create a cloned body that would live out a normal human life span. That, Bakura thought, was all he wanted now. He'd even give up all the magical power in the universe if he could just accomplish that: a normal life with Ryou.
But the research scientist's experiments all seemed to have ended in the same dead end. If the technical notes didn't make that clear enough, the personal journal they found among the medical records certainly did. Satomi had despaired of keeping a specimen alive any longer than a few days.
"Huh," Bakura grunted sarcastically. "What do you know; Drakken did a better job than this 'expert.' At least this body is supposed to last a few months, not just days!"
"Bakura," Ryou said sadly. "Look, there's still more... there must be something here..."
They read the last pages of the journal together. There was something, it seemed, although they weren't sure what it meant at first. Satomi suddenly went off on a tangent about some new information he'd received from a former student...
Ryou sat up with a gasp, and Bakura stared more closely at the scrawled journal.
"Ah yes, I forgot about the mysterious associate who got all the students so excited," Bakura said with renewed interest. "Let's see what he had to say about all this..."
The notes, however, grew nearly incoherent after that. Satomi's student had apparently brought him information that seemed, at first, far too good to be true, and then, for some reason, the journal became filled with terror and regret.
"He's rambling," Bakura stated flatly as they scanned the final pages, scribbled so hastily they were hardly legible. "He went mad..."
"And committed suicide," Ryou said softly. "That's terrible."
Bakura supposed Ryou felt sad for the man, but he could only feel disgust and frustration. He didn't say it aloud, but he began to have an idea of how all those not-so-coincidental murders had happened after all, and he was more convinced than ever that Satomi hadn't killed himself, no matter how much of a failure he'd been. It made him wonder if the mysterious colleague was really the one here in Tokyo who wanted these files back so badly, after all.
Not that it mattered to him if he was. They pulled the final papers from the bottom of the case, although Bakura didn't really see the point. Satomi had failed in his research and then at life. It was time to think of looking elsewhere.
"Bakura," Ryou said wonderingly as he opened the final folder. "This is something different... Look!"
At first, Bakura couldn't see what Ryou thought was so different or so interesting about the remaining papers. They weren't in Satomi's handwriting or in the same printed form as his research notes; instead, they consisted of some brief, handwritten notes, with a few scribbled notations in a different handwriting, and a couple of colorless pictures of a bandaged man lying in a bed.
"What good are those," Bakura grumbled, puzzled by Ryou's rising interest.
"These are old!" Ryou exclaimed softly. "And strange... I don't think they knew about cloning back then... but look! This man stayed alive for years without - " he paused, swallowing, as he was overtaken by some shiver of emotion Bakura felt through their link but couldn't name. "That's terrible," was all Ryou said after that.
Bakura gave in and read the file, what he could decipher of it. It was indeed a gloomy story, and even if it was a strange one, Bakura couldn't see how it could help him any. So what if a man had somehow survived so many years without food and drink, without sleep, without aging? He was dead long ago, as the notes made quite clear. From the sound of it, he'd been only too anxious to leave life behind after existing like that for so long, anyway.
"Satomi must have thought this would give him the answer to keeping the cloned organs alive," Ryou said thoughtfully, as Bakura handed him the last of the old pages.
"And when he realized it was no use, he gave up," Bakura said flatly.
"I suppose so," Ryou said sadly. "But still... There must be something here. He was making progress; maybe if we learn more...someone who could stay alive like that for so long, it must be possible." He stared at the old photograph. "Does he look a little bit familiar?" Ryou wondered.
Bakura glanced over his shoulder one more time and shrugged. "How could he be? He's long gone from this world!" Besides, he thought, the sad face was hardly visible in that faded colorless picture, anyway.
Ryou trailed off, lost in his own thoughts. Bakura stuff the rest of Satomi's papers back in the case and closed it dismissively. He sat back, munching on rice cake, while Ryou got up and paced across the park, still staring down at the old papers and the photograph in his hand. Bakura allowed himself to wonder if it was possible, if there was any answer in those old files at all. Maybe there was...
He must have been part of Ryou too long, he thought with a little ironic smile at himself, if he could actually feel something like hope.
"I don't understand," Ryou said, with his head bowed so low his voice was muffled.
Bakura wondered what he was wondering about. Ryou's pale hair gleamed ghostly white in the deeper shadow at the edge of the park as he walked further away.
The back of Bakura's neck prickled. Ryou's steps looked jerky and stiff, hesitant, even though he kept walking away.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"I don't know!" Ryou answered.
Bakura heard the note of panic in Ryou's voice at the same time he sensed the strange magic in the air. He jumped to his feet, but found to his horror that his weary body was still moving more slowly than usual. It only took a second, but Ryou was already out of sight among the bushes by the time he got to the edge of the park.
"Bakura! I can't stop!" Ryou's wail ended on a squeak of terror and then broke off into utter silence.
Bakura dove through the bushes toward the sound of his voice, and stopped, frozen in horror. Dr. Jackal held the sheath of papers, the old records from Satomi's file, rolled up in one gloved hand. His other hand held the tip of a scalpel blade at Ryou's throat.
It was clear that Ryou could not move, even if he'd wanted to - and Bakura was just as glad that he couldn't. Lady Poison stepped out of the shadows next to Jackal. Bakura caught a faint whiff of a scent in the air, which must have come from Lady Poison even though she didn't have a vial in her hand.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry..." Ryou chanted in a whisper, lips barely moving and eyes clenched shut.
Harm him at your peril, the growled threat came to Bakura's mind, but he couldn't force the words past his dry lips. He knew exactly how sharp and quick those blades could be in Jackal's hand. By the time he pulled a card out of his pocket, Ryou's life would be pouring out of his throat onto the ground.
Bakura felt caught in an agony of helpless rage, more horrified than he could remember being since he was a child. He would plead or bargain anything to get Ryou away from that blade unharmed, and he knew it probably wouldn't matter.
"Do not harm him," he said finally. Neither a plea nor a warning, knowing both were useless, his voice only sounded flat.
Ryou whispered a plea of his own, but not for his own life. "Please - I'm sorry - I only wanted the information to keep him alive...I don't want to lose him."
"Ah," Jackal said softly, "Yes, I can imagine you would."
"Please," Ryou whispered.
Bakura didn't understand Akabane's comment. He only knew that if Ryou died under that blade, his last living act with this weak, cloned body would be to kill Dr. Jackal by any means possible.
concluded in Chapter 8
