Disclaimer: I do not own Haruka and Michiru's characters, they belong to Naoko Takeuchi. All other characters and this story belong to me.

Note: This is rated "M" for a reason. If you have issues with coarse language, girl on girl action and substance abuse references, do not indulge yourself in this.

Chapter 14

Hell

Michiru heard voices around her as she struggled to stay with reality, only to fall into the depths of unconsciousness. She didn't know how long she had been in and out of this world by the time she was able to stick to it long enough to want to be taken by the darkness again. Her entire body felt like all the racers she knew drove over it, followed by some mean kicking of the losers. She couldn't open her eyes, she felt like she didn't have the energy to even do that. Beads of sweat tickled her as they trickled down her body and her brain slowly noted that she was undressed below the waist. Michiru desperately wanted to open her eyes and see where she was and what was going on around her, but she couldn't as the sleep took over her once again.

x x x

Then next time she woke up, she opened her eyes in the darkness of a room barely lit by the moonlight. Her body was still covered in sweat, she was laying on her back, and an annoying itching sensation was bothering her in her left arm. She gathered the little strength she had to bring her right hand up and reach for her left, to get rid of the annoying bug, but a firm grip on her wrist prevented her from doing so.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

She recognized the voice, it was husky, familiar, even soothing, despite its mean tone. She wanted to ask why she couldn't get rid of the annoying feeling, but the world spun around and she felt like she was being carried away by a gentle but unyielding wave, right into the sea of darkness.

The daylight blinded her when she woke up again. She felt a cold cloth travel up and down her body, relieving her of some of the sweat. It felt like the best caress she had ever felt in her life and she wanted it to never stop. However, it did come to an end and her body was all of a sudden shivering from the chills. She mentally inspected her own body, her eyes closed, and felt like her hands and legs were starting to get cramps. She tried to flex them to relieve that growing notion, but found that she didn't have enough energy to do that.

x x x

An unfamiliar female voice was talking above her head as she became conscious. Michiru didn't try to open her eyes and just listened to the conversation.

"She did coke before? You're lucky she didn't come up with mixing the two up yet, we would've been spending Christmas Day at her funeral." The woman's voice sounded amused.

"I don't know what would've been better," the husky one replied.

"Oh, stop it, you're like a big child who denies liking a toy, only to take it away from the other kids who want to play with it."

"I do no such thing." The husky voice became familiarly annoyed.

"You would, given the chance," yhe other female voice replied.

"Who gave you the notion that you know me-"

Michiru stopped listening as a loud scream rang in her ears; she only realized it was hers when she found herself sitting upright, staring at two surprised faces.

"That would be the extra sensitivity of the genitals," Sayuri announced as she pulled the catheter all the way out. "Sorry."

"You know, you could've been a bit more careful if you knew that to be a side effect," Haruka grumbled.

"See, now you're turning all bully on me because I may have touched your toy," Sayuri smirked.

"More like permanently crippled it." Haruka gestured to Michiru who was sitting upright, unmoving, her eyes wide, her mouth still open from her scream.

"That's easily fixed."

Michiru felt a soft hand reach her forehead and push her steadily down. Her last thought before she fell asleep was that she never wanted to see that woman anywhere near her body again.

x x x

Michiru was no longer half-naked upon her next awakening, nor was she tied down with any tubes. It was getting dark outside and she felt like every bone in her body was melting, seeping through her nonexistent muscle. She opened her eyes and struggled to sit up.

"Where are you going?"

She turned at the sound of a tired voice and saw Haruka sitting on the bed, her back against the headboard.

"Bathroom," Michiru mastered as she finally got control of her body and sat up, moving her feet to the floor.

"Want help?" Haruka watched her struggle.

"No." Michiru was determined to make it out of bed on her own. Her body, however, wasn't really cooperating and her bones hurt so much that as soon as her feet touched the floor, her body followed, landing her sprawled on the cold concrete.

"Want help now?" Haruka didn't move until she heard a mumble that was most likely an agreement.

Michiru was still trying to pick herself up when strong arms pulled her up in one motion and set her on her feet. She shook unsteadily as the arms left her and felt a hand grab her upper arm, guiding her to the bathroom. She landed on the toilet with all the force her weight and gravity exerted and cried out in pain. She saw Haruka's indifferent face look at her through her own tears and flinched as a hand approached her.

Haruka wiped the blood that trickled down Michiru's nose from the impact with the unforgiving floor with her thumb, washed her hand in the sink and left the miserable woman by herself. She walked back into the bedroom and changed the dirty sheets. She heard the toilet flush and waited to see if Michiru made it back on her own. She did not, so Haruka went back to the bathroom to find Michiru slowly crawling back towards the bedroom. Haruka made a tsking noise with her tongue before she opened the door to the shower stall and turned the water on.

"Crawl in there."

Michiru tried to raise her head to Haruka's face, but that proved to be too high. She remembered sweating every time she woke up, so she slowly made her way towards the warm water, as directed. It even felt relieving to her bones to feel the water hug her body as it trickled down from a wide shower head. Michiru sat down and brought her knees to her chest, right in the middle of the stream of water.

Haruka set a sponge and a bottle of liquid soap in front of the sitting woman. "Wash yourself." She closed the see-through door, leaned against the sink counter and watched Michiru do nothing.

"Why are you so mean to me?" Michiru finally whispered, not even sure if Haruka could hear her through the water.

"I don't like to be manipulated."

"I didn't manipulate you."

"Not consciously or directly, your mother did that for you, but you're still the cause."

"Let me go, I'll relieve you of my presence."

Haruka chuckled. "Oh no, that's someone who wants to go for another score talking. So, no, I'm not letting you go."

"You just like to watch me suffer!" Michiru managed to shout.

"You did this to yourself, it's a result of your own stupidity, so I have absolutely no remorse for you."

"So you seek me out and drag me here to torture me?" Michiru was shivering again.

Haruka narrowed her eyes. "I didn't bring you here. I would much rather prefer to never see you again. Unfortunately for both of us, you almost killed yourself and I'm stuck here with you because your mother is desperate enough to go against me."

Michiru had no idea whatsoever what the blonde was talking about, all she knew was that Haruka asked her to stay away and she did. It wasn't easy to not follow up on the desire of being next to the blonde, so Michiru found other ways to occupy her time with her new friends. Then... then she just found herself in a whirlwind where the few minutes of euphoria made her feel whole and complete, truly happy, while the rest of the time she was miserable, angry and alone. So she kept on going in search of that euphoria by any means she could achieve. She remembered seeing her mother, the demon and Haruka, but she didn't know what was part of reality and what was part of her hallucinations anymore. In fact, she didn't even know if her sitting on the floor of Haruka's shower was real or just a figment of the imagination brought on by the chemical high. "Then you should've let me die."

There was a note of determination in that voice that Haruka suspected wasn't a bluff. That suspicion was exactly why she needed to know how serious Michiru was. She disconnected herself from the counter, opened the shower stall, turned the water off and left the bathroom. She came back in and faced the still sitting woman. "You want to die? Here, do it."

Michiru forced her head to fall backwards, which resulted in her eyes falling on a black gun that was extended in Haruka's hand. There weren't many thoughts in Michiru's head at this point and the only thing she could really concentrate on was the unbearable pain that was spreading through her whole body. That pain made her wish for the darkness to fall upon her like it did throughout the night before, but she wasn't sleepy, nor was she blacking out. The gun in front of her face seemed like an equally good option. In the end, at that exact moment in life, there was nothing left for Michiru but pain.

An unsteady, shaky hand reached out and grabbed the gun. It buckled under the weight that Michiru didn't expect, but came back up and landed in her lap. She held the butt of the gun with both hands, the very end of which touched her knees, the barrel parallel to her torso. Michiru inspected the weapon she had never held in her hands before, put her chin on top of the barrel and pulled the trigger.

x x x

Daiki made his way inside the garage, put the pin in his cellphone and entered the underground room. He looked around in search of a thin silver laptop and breathed out in satisfaction once he found it. He then grabbed one of the external hard drives and plugged it into the server in case the information in that particular location needed to be accessed. He grabbed what he came there for and made his way out as carefully as he made it in, unnoticed by anyone. He made his way back to the large SUV and got behind the wheel, passing the sleeved laptop to his passenger.

"That's all we need?"

He nodded. "That's all the hardware we need, the software runs in the blonde head."

Sayuri chuckled. "I'm sure she'll appreciate getting her hands on work on Christmas Day."

"She doesn't care for Christmas, you know that. None of us do."

"That is truly astonishing." She turned to the street. "What should we have for dinner tonight?"

"I dunno, what do people eat for Christmas?"

"Why are you looking at me like I would know? Keep your eyes on the road," Sayuri mumbled.

A shrill of a phone caught their attention as they tried to figure out what kind of food they were in the mood for. Sayuri looked around and found an unfamiliar silver device under the dashboard.

"That would be the harpy," Daiki said, nodding at the new disposable phone he had recently acquired.

"How does she like that nickname of hers?" Sayuri caught the little device between two of her fingers.

"Why don't you ask her?" Daiki nodded at the phone that was still ringing.

"How do you like to be called a harpy?" Sayuri asked as a greeting.

"What the fuck? Who… Sayuri? Wh...? Never mind."

"Are you sure you still want to go there, she sounds really mad?" Sayuri looked up at the driver.

"She can probably hear you too." Daiki nodded at the uncovered speaker.

"Would you two stop your little shitty conversation and pay attention to me?" Haruka yelled on the other end of the line.

"What happened, dear?"

"What happened is that Michiru said that we should have let her die, I gave her a gun and she put it straight to her chin and fired. What the fuck do I do now?"

Sayuri stared at the phone in stunned silence as Daiki continued to drive like nothing happened. He faced his passenger when the wild yellow eyes landed on him and grimaced. "Put her on speaker."

Sayuri did as she was told, her hand shaking just ever so slightly.

"Kid."

"Dai."

"Kid, did you have enough brains to unload the gun before you handed it to her?"

Sayuri looked at him with some hope and held her breath for the answer.

"Do you think I'm insane? Of course I unloaded the gun!"

Sayuri breathed out in relief as Daiki threw her an amused glance. "Then why are you freaking out?"

"I'm not freaking out, I've just had it. I'm done with her, I'm done with this babysitting shit, I'm done playing nice for some obscure cause."

"Chill. We'll stop by and talk it over dinner. What would you like to eat?" Daiki asked evenly, ignoring the sided glance from Sayuri.

"What the fuck do I care? I'm not even hungry."

Daiki sighed. "You're just as helpful as Say. I'll see you shortly… and kid…"

"What?"

"Don't give the suicidal girl any more weapons."

"Fuck you."

Daiki laughed out loud as Haruka hung up the phone.

"What's so funny?" Sayuri quizzed.

"She is."

"Haruka?"

"No, Michiru." He looked at her like she was stupid. "Yes, Haruka."

"Why is she funny?"

"Because she's freaking out. Haruka never freaks out."

"She didn't really sound freaked out to me, she sounded very mad."

"Say, she always sounds mad. Mad or cold. Mad usually means she's feeling something." Daiki was talking from experience. "So right now she's mad because she's freaking out."

"I still don't see how that's funny, but then again, I'm not a part of your crazy family."

"Would you like to be?" He looked at her and she stared back, trying to see something in the black eyes, whether it was mirth or seriousness.

"Are you proposing to me?" Sayuri finally asked.

"Would you like me to?" He was still facing her and not the street.

"No." She turned back to face where they were going before he did. "I want to stay away from the two of you nutty people as far as I can. This is too much as it is." She referred to their getting dinner together and driving to Haruka's house which was what they were doing initially.

"See, I find a woman, I'm ready to make the offer, and she so bluntly denies me."

"Oh, stop it with the hurt act." Sayuri waved a hand at him. "You two always jump to extremes it's either all or nothing with you."

"Since when is that a bad thing?" Daiki wondered.

"Since we have an arrangement, stick to it," Sayuri bit back. "I'm in the mood for a steak."

Daiki smiled. Whether she knew it or not, he did love that woman.

x x x

A very angry Haruka opened the door for her guests an hour later. "Explain to me again why the fuck the two of you were coming here in the first place?"

"Good Evening to you too." Sayuri walked in, carrying a brown bag.

"Because we wanted to celebrate Christmas like a family!" Daiki announced in an overly jovial voice.

"It's Christmas Day, people have dinner on Christmas Eve, you moron," Haruka muttered. "Since when do we celebrate any holiday and since when do we have a family?"

Daiki sighed heavily as he pushed the blonde out of the way and set the two bags he was carrying on the kitchen counter.

"Where is Michiru?" Sayuri asked as she took her scarf and her coat off.

"Downstairs," Haruka replied evenly, peaking in one of the bags. The hour that had

passed was enough for her to restore her usual cool.

"You left a suicidal woman alone downstairs?" Sayuri raised a questioning eyebrow.

"I locked her in the empty room." She took plates out of a cupboard as though the discussion they were having was about the weather.

"You locked her in the dungeon?" Daiki smirked.

"The dungeon?" Sayuri looked from one relative to the other.

"It's just an empty room that was supposed to be an office, but then I changed my mind, so it's empty," Haruka explained as she took the plates, forks and knives to the coffee table.

"Why did you call it a dungeon?" Sayuri followed Daiki to the table with food.

"This whole house looked like a dungeon before she put her sorry ass of an excuse for a furniture collection in." Daiki sat on the pillow and pointed at the two chairs and other sparse furnishings.

"At least I don't have the shitty furniture you do." Haruka popped the tops off of the containers.

"No, you have extremely uncomfortable furniture of questionable desig,." Daiki retorted.

"I find Gehry's furniture quite appealing, although I like his architecture better." Sayuri grabbed one of the steaks with her fork.

"How so?" Haruka was loading some mashed potatoes on her plate.

"I did a study exchange program in med school, so I lived in Chicago for a semester. I loved the Millennium Park and found the Pritzker Pavilion fascinating," Sayuri explained as she meticulously cut her steak in small pieces.

"I'm starting to like youl" Haruka admitted as she grabbed a piece of stake for herself. "You guys didn't get any salad? What's wrong with you?" She looked at her visitors as they shrugged.

"Sayuri said she was in the mood for a steak, you said you weren't hungry. Deal with it."

Haruka scowled in return and took a great pleasure in cutting the meat in her plate.

x x x

Michiru was curled up in a ball on top of a sleeping bag. She wished she could just fall asleep, but her mind wouldn't shut down. Her mind kept racing ever since her finger pulled the trigger and she heard a click, but didn't get any relief. She didn't get any pain beyond the one she already had either, so she just stared at the gun before it was yanked out of her hands. There were no words exchanged after that, Haruka simply threw a towel over Michiru and then dragged her to an empty room, leaving her there. Michiru saw her come back in a couple of minutes and throw a sleeping bag along with some clothes on the floor, shut off the light and disappear behind the door again. Michiru just kept sitting on the floor that soon turned from cold to warm and wondered if it was another characteristic of the hell she was in. The water that was still left on her body dried on its own, while Michiru just stared at the door from the same position. Eventually she got up and slowly dressed herself in the provided clothes, unrolled the sleeping bag and curled on top of it. She didn't bother to turn the light on, she didn't bother to try and open the door. She just lay there on the sleeping bag on top of the heated floor, staring into nowhere. At some point she started to notice that her cheeks were wet from her tears, even though she didn't mean to cry. She didn't feel upset, she just felt empty. Devoid of any purpose in life and wishing for something to take her out of her misery. She would have preferred to do so with at least a moment of euphoria. She tried to do so by the only other option she had been given. She was still there, on the floor, in the darkness of a small room, all alone. Broken. Empty. Lifeless.

x x x

"So why do you have locks on your doors?"

"Come again?" Haruka turned towards Sayuri.

"You said that you locked Michiru in the room, why do you have locks on the doors? You live alone," Sayuri elaborated.

"Same reason why I have a gun - in case of emergency."

"Do you actually know how to use a gun?" Sayuri asked as she watched Daiki clean out the table.

"I do."

"She's pretty good at it too, so I wouldn't mess with her," Daiki warned.

"So would you shoot an apple from the top of my head?" Sayuri ignored the man.

Haruka cocked her head to the side, studying the woman in front of her. "I would. Would you like to try it?"

"Do you have apples?"

"Okay," Daiki sounded a bit exasperated. "You girls really need to unwind."

Haruka stared at him as he set a smaller brown bag on the table and took a bottle with green liquid out, followed by some other paraphernalia.

"Is that-" Haruka raised her wide blue eyes to Daiki.

"Absinthe? Yes, it is." He smiled.

"Are you out of your fucking mind? I'm dealing with a druggie and you bring drugs here?"

"You are out of your fucking mind, it's a drink, not a drug."

"You have to burn it to make it!"

"Just because it looks like a quack, it aint a quack. Besides, you don't have to burn it, it's just a sexier way to do it." Daiki set three glasses on the table, followed by three shot glasses.

"I'm not touching that shit." Haruka leaned back, untangling her folded feet and bringing them in front of her.

"Oh yes you are. You need to unwind. You don't do drugs, you're not racing tonight, you don't customarily drink nearly enough, and I doubt you'll be fucking any time soon, so yes, you're touching that."

"Uh uh." She hugged her knees to her chest.

"Haruka, it's just a drink. It's simply stronger and more beautiful than many others," Sayuri reasoned.

"I'm gonna go check on my captive." Haruka got up and grabbed a glass of water from the kitchen before she walked down the stairs.

Daiki watched her go as he opened the bottle, put some of the green liquid in the three glasses and put a spoon with a slit in the middle on top of one of them. "And we sit, and we wait." He winked at Sayuri.

x x x

Michiru was blinded by the light right after the door opened. She covered her eyes with her hand and let them get used to the brightness gradually. Haruka appeared in her view as she removed her hand. They both looked at each other in silence before Haruka extended a glass of water and Michiru accepted it. "Do you need to use the bathroom?"

Michiru shook her head. What she needed was something to relieve the pain her body was in. "Can you give me something?" Hopeful blues looked at the stern ones.

"Something like what?"

"Something that will make me feel better?" Michiru licked her lips as she finished the water in the glass.

"The only thing that will make you feel better right now is more drugs and I'm not giving you that."

"Why?" Michiru felt the stupid tears stream down her cheeks again, despite her being angry, not upset.

"Because I'm a mean bitch," Haruka said sarcastically.

"No, you're not, you're the nicest person I've ever met." Michiru put a hand on Haruka's cheek in a slight caress.

Haruka's eyes narrowed into thin slits as she grabbed the hand that was on her cheek and forced it down. "It's not going to work. Paying compliments won't work. Offering sex won't work. Pleading won't work. Yelling won't work. Nothing will work. You're getting through this without any drugs, so stop trying."

The sweet expression on Michiru's face disappeared, replaced by an angry scowl.

"That's better. I like it when you don't lie, mermaid." Haruka let her go.

Michiru walked back to the pad and sat down, hugging her knees like Haruka had just minutes ago. "Get out of my room, I don't want to see you," she hissed.

"With pleasure." Haruka turned the light off and locked the door on her way out.

Michiru listened to the disappearing steps as she rocked back and forth, staring into the darkness and wondering what she could do to get out. Her mind was becoming clearer and clearer, and her mind knew that Haruka would not yield. However, her mind was concentrating on one thing and one thing only: she needed more. For that, she needed to get out.