I'm sorry I haven't updated in forever! It's no excuse for leaving everyone hanging like that, but ice storms and lack of access to a computer are not conducive to writing!
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Disclaimer: If you don't know that I don't own Drrr! by this point, that's sad.
Shinra had just finished setting out his medical tools when he heard the door open. He looked up from spreading a sterile plastic sheet over the kitchen table and saw Celty escorting Izaya into the apartment. The informant held Arlua's limp form in his arms. Shinra blinked; both of them were splattered with blood, and were leaving a crimson trail from where the blood was dripping from Arlua's shoulder.
"Wow. You two really are a mess," Shinra commented. "Put her here," he added quickly when Izaya shot him a glare. The informant obeyed, and Shinra carefully cut the cloth of the technician's shirt away from the wound. "So, are you going to tell me what's going on?"
"I don't think you need to be worried about that at the moment," Izaya replied shortly. Shinra sighed.
"Fine, fine. Now hold her down so I don't cause more damage while I get the bullet out," the underground doctor ordered.
Arlua was floating in a dark haze. She remembered the sound of the gun, the agony in her shoulder, and looking around to see Izaya running toward her. She remembered him going down, remembered a glimpse of Supai darting through the crowd, gun in hand.
Then blackness. Then cool relief, and the wonderful absence of pain.
She woke slowly, her body feeling oddly heavy. Her mind was fuzzy and her vision blurry as she struggled to blink awake.
"Finally awake?" a familiar voice asked. Whose voice was that? The technician couldn't place it. "Take it easy. You're on some fairly strong painkillers," the voice continued. Arlua groaned and tried to sit up, but her body didn't move right. She suspected it was her injured shoulder that was causing the problems, but her brain didn't want to put the effort into really thinking about it, so she dismissed the issue for the moment and focused on that voice. She looked around groggily and found a familiar figure standing over her.
"Shin…ra…?" she mumbled, frowning. "Wha…?"
"Celty brought you and Izaya here. Supai, Tania, and Shizuo are here, too. It's a miracle the place is still standing with Izaya and Shizuo both here, but they've turned my apartment into a hotel, and interrupted every aspect of my life with Celty!" the doctor complained.
"Tough luck. Your place was the safest meeting point," a second familiar voice grumbled.
"Shi?" Arlua turned her head to see her blond friend sitting on Shinra's coffee table. Which meant she was more than likely laying on Shinra's couch.
"Hey. How are you feeling?" Shizuo asked, concern showing in his expression. Arlua managed a smile.
"Like I'm on fairly strong painkillers," she replied, her mind clearing at last. "Shinra, you said Supai and Tania were here too?"
"We're right here," Tania answered, stepping into view and twining her fingers with Shizuo's. "Your boss wanted to come see you, by the way, but the flea wouldn't let him." Arlua frowned.
"How long was I out?" she demanded. "And why wouldn't Izz…Orihara let Yamakawa see me?"
"About a day. Shinra kept you under to keep an eye on your wound. Apparently when you started to wake up the first time, you wiggled around so much that you nearly fell off the couch," Supai answered, leaning over the back of said couch to grin at her. "As for Yamakawa, well…"
"To start with, his real name is Nakao," Tania broke in. Arlua blinked.
"Huh?"
"That's enough," announced another voice, this one astonishingly familiar considering it had been weeks since she had heard it. "She needs rest, so leave her alone." Shizuo scowled and opened his mouth to say something, but Tania squeezed his hand gently, and he sighed. To everyone's apparent surprise, Arlua glared in the direction of the voice.
"Oh, no. You don't get to do this, you filthy germ," she snapped. Supai laughed shortly and left the room quickly. Tania pulled Shizuo after him, and Shinra followed after pausing to give Izaya a warning glance, as if to say 'Don't you dare upset her so much that it causes a relapse.'
"Do what, Lu-chan?" Izaya inquired, moving around the couch and sitting on the coffee table, where Shizuo had been a moment earlier.
"Waltz in after weeks of pretending I don't exist, and say crap like that like you're concerned about me, and start calling me that name again," she spat. He sighed.
"Lu-"
"No. My name is Teki," she snapped. He met her angry gaze with his own calm-yet-sad one. She refused to acknowledge the sad part of that look, instead focusing on the fact that he was calm. He had known she would react like this!
"Fair enough. I'll just go back to calling you Tek-chan then," he said evenly. She scowled and opened her mouth to snap at him some more, then froze.
"What did you just say?" she demanded. He sighed again.
"Tek-chan. That's what I've been calling you for the last few weeks, except in my head, where you're still Lu-chan to me," he elaborated. She gaped at him, her still-slightly-painkiller-fuzzy mind struggling to make sense of this completely inconceivable thing he had just revealed.
"You…you're Kura-kun?" she whispered. Izaya nodded, emotions hidden behind a blank expression rather than the smirk she had expected.
"I didn't spend the last few weeks pretending you didn't exist, Lu-chan," he said quietly, purposefully using the first nickname. "I spent the last few weeks ensuring that you continued to exist. If you had shown any sign of knowing that I was the one you were emailing, it could have tipped off Homeron's guards. If I had acknowledged you in person or made any other form of noticeable contact, we would both have been killed, which I'm fairly certain you were aware of. Can you really blame me for protecting you?"
"AS if you did it for me! You did it to save your own germy hide!" she growled. He shook his head.
"No, Lu-chan-"
"Quit calling me that! And don't call me Tek-chan either!" she shouted. "You have no right to use any sort of familiar form of address with me, you little cretin!" Izaya closed his eyes and pressed his lips together.
"Lu-chan," he said firmly. When she started to protest the use of the nickname, he held up a hand, and she settled for glaring at him. "I know you don't believe me. But I am capable of protecting myself. If it were just to save my own skin, I would have simply killed Homeron's watchers. But that might have set her off, made her go after you. So to protect you, I went along with her rules, stayed under the radar as much as I could. I didn't contact you in person, and I was careful to disguise the emails we exchanged. I also monitored your situation indirectly through my disreputable cousin."
"And now? Everyone's here together. Surely Natsuki will be 'set off' as you put it by that," she snapped.
"Considering she already tried to have everyone in this apartment except Shinra and Celty assassinated, I don't think we can set her off any more at this point," he pointed out.
"So it was her people that did this?" she asked, nodding to the bandages around her shoulder. Izaya's expression darkened.
"Yes. And she'll pay for it. Her people are already dead, except for her brother, who vanished once I turned him away and informed him that we knew who he really was," the informant replied. Arlua frowned. Was he saying that he was going to make Natsuki pay…for ordering her people to attack the technician?
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he really is concerned about me or why he stayed away. He lied to me and never explained. He could have had Supai tell me, or he could have trusted me to conceal who I was emailing. He didn't have to lie to me the whole time.
Then she noticed that there were bandages peeking out from a rip across the chest of his shirt.
"Did her people do that, too?" she asked, automatically reaching out to brush her fingers – not the ones attached to her injured shoulder – over the line of bandaging.
"Yes. One of them tried to stab me while I was trying to get to you," he told her, his voice low and almost gentle as he watched her frown at his injury.
She realized that she was lightly stroking his chest and yanked her hand back.
"Good. I hear being injured is usually karma for lying," she growled, folding her arms so she wouldn't reach for him again, and wincing when the action tugged at her wound, which was presumably stitched up. She turned her head toward the back of the couch. "Go away, cretin," she said, suddenly exhausted. "I'm too tired to put up with your crap."
He was quiet for a long moment. Then she heard him shift as if standing. Another quiet moment. Then she tenses as she felt his lips brush her temple.
"I'll send Shinra and the monster and the others back in," he informed her. Then he was gone, and she told herself that the sudden ache in her chest was from her bullet wound.