When Fujin woke up, she was surprised not to have dreamed.

She had commandeered one corner of the old couch, curled up on one of the cushions with her head resting on the armrest. Sunlight was cutting through the clouds outside, and she could feel the slight warmth of it on her back. For a long moment she wanted to just close her eyes again, burrow deeper into the cushions, and fall asleep again--but she resister the urge, and stretched out instead.

--almost. She stopped herself before she went too far--Seifer had taken up residence at the opposite end of the couch, and she came perilously close to kicking him in the injured ribs. While allowing herself a moment of amusement at the rude awakening that would have meant for Seifer, she decided that he had put up with enough over the past few days and took pity on him. She rolled off the couch and onto her feet, taking a quick look around.

Seifer was sprawled out on the couch--one hand thrown over the armrest and the other dangling over the back--and looked to be quite fast asleep. Raijin was nearby--stretched out in the corner near the fireplace, having confiscated the middle cushion from the couch and used it as a pillow. From the angle at which she stood, Fujin could see Lu in the kitchen--wrapped in one of the house's blankets, leaning against the stove.

Squall and Nida were nowhere to be found, though Squall's jacket was hanging over the back of one of the wooden chairs. The fur ruff looked as if it had finally dried out--all while still stuck together. Fujin chuckled quietly to herself at the image of Squall going through it with a brush and comb, trying to restore it to its former glory.

Slipping quietly past Lu to the back door, she glanced out into the garden. Nida and Squall were there, engaged in what looked to be a lively debate over something or other--probably either mission orders or logistics, Fujin guessed. Whatever it was, it looked like they had been arguing it for a while now--and would probably continue for some time. She slipped back into the living room--and from there, after only a brief hesitation, into the bedroom.

Taiga was lying on the bed, sprawled haphazardly across the bare mattress. His wounded side was clogging up with some kind of white ichor--something the exoskeleton secreted, Fujin identified. Some kind of biological sealant. Taiga would probably be hungry once he woke up, if the suit had needed to synthesize that much of it.

Shutting the door carefully behind her, he approached the bedside. "FATHER," she said, standing carefully far enough away not to run the risk of being counted a threat. "MORNING."

Taiga didn't move.

Fujin frowned. Taiga was notoriously easy to wake up--all cyborgs were. The ICI regulated sleep, and the ICI was what kept a constant tab on the environment--if the ICI noticed a significant change, it would respond by waking up the host body. In any circumstance that Fujin could think of, being hailed would count as a significant change.

...then again, she rationalized, the ICI was probably not programmed to recognized "father" as a hail directed toward the host.

"TAIGA," she tried--and then, when that didn't work, "TAIGA C1128513."

Nothing.

Distressed now, Fujin took a step closer to the bed and rolled Taiga onto his back. He didn't react at all--he just rolled, limp.

Fujin had studied hard at Garden. She knew the steps to go through when a person was unconscious and unresponsive--but she had to struggle to remember them as they fought through the haze of disbelief and panic that was swelling in her mind.

Very carefully, she lifted Taiga's chin and felt for breathing--it was there, weak and slow, but present. His pulse was the same.

Feeling her own breath and pulse rates rise, Fujin skirted around the bed to examine Taiga's side. The wound had been cleaned out fairly well--there were no remaining shards of armor that would provide complications in the healing, and there was no discoloration in the sealant.

Snaking a hand under Taiga's neck, Fujin felt carefully for any break in the shunts and wires that lead into the spinal cord. As far as she could tell, there wee none.

Limited knowledge of cyborg medical procedure exhausted, Fujin could only stand and stare as she wondered what to do.

It took her almost a minute to come up with the option get help, and almost a minute more before her body would agree with her brain and carry her back into the living room.

Raijin woke up when she kicked him in the ribs, harder than she usually intended to. He spluttered something unintelligible--then froze when he looked up at Fujin. For a moment they stared at each other--Fujin's face reading an incredible harried concern and Raijin's reading a muddled confusion--and then Fujin turned and rushed off without saying anything.

"H-hey!" Raijin scrambled to his feet, staring after her. "Fuj'? Hey--Fuj?"

Fujin had already made her way into the kitchen and had woken Lu--a more plausible source of help--abruptly by taking the blanket and tearing it away from her with the speed of panic. Lu jumped--doubly startled when she saw Fujin. "Wh--what?"

"TAIGA," Fujin managed, too flustered to really manage anything coherent. "NOT SLEEPING--ICI--"

Lu struggled to her feet, still blinking sleep out of her eyes. Picking up only the generalities of what Fujin was saying, she headed toward the bedroom.

They passed through the living room, in which Seifer was being awoken by the ambient confusion. He seemed about to demand to know what the hell was going on--but, upon noticing Fujin's expression as she hurried after Lu, he quickly decided that hell wouldn't be a strong enough intensifier and opted for following them instead. Raijin lumbered after them, looking fairly useless and feeling even more so.

By the time they got into the bedroom Fujin had already explained to Lu in a mix of sentence fragments and unaccompanied verbs the problem, and Lu had sighed and shaken her head. "I've heard of this status," she said, motioning vaguely toward Taiga's form. "He's shut down--it's something that happens if a cyborg's been too badly damaged. They just go blank and don't do anything--it's to conserve energy until they can be recovered. There's nothing we can do unless we get him back to a cybernetics facility. It's a critical condition--"

"NO!"

Everyone in the room jumped. Fujin had pulled herself up to her full height----a height which looked inestimably more impressive when accompanied by the burning glare she was bestowing upon Lu.

"Anyev, it's--I'm not saying--" Lu began.

"NO! UNACCEPTABLE!" Fujin gestured, very nearly ramming her hand into the wall behind her. With the force of the vehemence she poured into her protest, it was likely that had she hit the wall she would be nursing several broken bones. "NOT CRITICAL. REPAIR!"

Lu backed into a wall, concentrating more on getting away from that look than where she was going. "How am I--I know nothing about cybernetics! I can't do anything!"

Fujin was about to retort when the door slammed open again, admitting Nida and Squall--who had, evidently, heard the commotion from outside the house. "What's going on?" Nida demanded.

There was an explosion of noise as Lu, Raijin, and Fujin all tried to inform him at the same time. Nida waved his hands in the air, trying to inspire order and failing. Eventually, Squall drew his gunblade and fired a shot directly at the floor. Silence descended--if not immediately, then very quickly.

Nida put his hands down, glancing around the room in a vain hope of figuring out who would be able to give him the most information in the most logical fashion. Finally, with a groan, he settled on Fujin. "What's happening?"

"TAIGA," she snapped. "SHUTDOWN. NO RESPONSE. CANNOT REVIVE."

Nida nodded, making his way to the bedside. "Step back, will you? You're taking all of the oxygen."

Everyone in the room stepped back--as much as they could. The room wasn't exactly spacious to begin with, and cramming seven people into it hardly made it seem larger. Only Fujin refused to move--and, after glancing at her expression, Nida decided that trying to move her would be a losing battle. After checking Taiga's vitals, he nodded judiciously,

"This is on the mechanical side and not the biological side," he stated. "We'll--excuse the term. We'll reboot the mechanics, and that should wake him up."

"Reboot?" Lu wasn't convinced. "How do you plan on doing that?"

Nida backed up. "Like this," he said, and cast Thunder directly onto the bed.

Three things happened in some semblance of unison.

Everyone in the room, except Nida, flinched at the sudden blast of light and heat.

Fujin lunged at Nida, putting him into a wall with an unpleasant amount of force--

--and Taiga convulsed, hands flying to his face and doing nothing to cut out the feral scream that ripped out of his throat and lasted, wounding the air, the better part of a minute.

Fujin let go of Nida, approaching the bedside carefully. Nida turned and slunk out of the room, going largely unnoticed by everyone else.

Taiga dropped his hands, noticing for the first time the audience he seemed to have acquired. He was pale and clearly shocked--he couldn't muster up the will or the wit to say anything, only staring with an expression akin to terror.

Squall turned and walked out just as Taiga lost his composure completely, collapsing sideways into Fujin and swallowing sobs. Raijin muttered something awkward, and rushed out after him. Lu glanced away, clearly embarrassed before she exited the room. Only Seifer stayed to watch the scene--unfolding before him, but oblivious to him. He watched for quite some time.

-

When Seifer finally stepped out of the bedroom, the living room was deathly quiet. Nida was staring up at the ceiling, looking rather preoccupied. Squall was sitting on the couch, taking far more care than was necessary to clean imaginary spots off of his gunblade, and Raijin was fidgeting in the corner. Lu was nowhere to be seen--presumably in the kitchen or the yard.

Seifer cleared his throat. "The thing that bothers me," he said matter-of-factly, "is that Fujin ran off without saying anything to me. She should have known that we were a posse, and I would have followed her anywhere anyway."

No one in the room responded. Nida glanced at him and Raijin nodded uncomfortably, but Squall continued to clean his gunblade with a focus that bordered on singled-mindedness. Seifer glared at him for a moment before continuing.

"So I think if she's going to take Tai--her father back to Esthar, it should be pretty clear that I'm going, too. This is important to her, so the posse will make sure it gets done. ...get it?"

Squall nodded. "Understood," he said.

There was a silence that Seifer read as tense, but Squall seemed totally unconcerned toward. "...and?" Seifer prompted.

Squall paused in his cleaning, then carefully folded the cloth and slipped it back into his pack. "Naturally, we'll accompany you," he said.

Seifer stared. "...that's it?"

Squall finally deigned to glance up. "There's a terminal at Lesser Kay. We'll contact Garden from there and inform Cid of our situation."

There was a moment that Seifer couldn't help but read as a standoff.

Squall glanced down at his gunblade again, pulling the whetstone out of its pocket on the sheath and carefully sharpening the edge. It was clear that, from his perspective, at least, the conversation was over.

On some level, at least, Seifer was aware that he had--somehow--gained a concession from Squall without even trying. And, even though he was pretty sure he should be counting this as a good thing, there was something odd about Squall's sudden agreeability that had no idea how to read.

He had had his fill of things he didn't know how to read on this trip, and his mood was already souring at the thought of any more.

With mixed feelings, he stepped outside. His side hurt spectacularly, he was on a totally different continent than he wanted to be, and he had to put up with a crew whose purpose in the world seemed to be making his life more complicated than necessary. There wasn't much that could make him look on the situation as generally favorable--but at the very least, he reasoned, he could go get some fresh air.

And at least it wasn't raining, any more.