Sorry about that! Accidentally put up that latest chapter of another story rather than this one. But never fear! I have it! They were both in the Doc Manager and just both started with a B and I'm hungry and stupid, so yeah...but I fixed! I fixed!

Chapter 36

In less time than a breath, any shock, and depression and docile defeat, were done away with by a burning, ravenous rage. He hardly felt the remains of his hunger scratching at his heels like an annoying dog.

"I brought her to you to save her and this is what you do? Throw her in a den of blood thirsty monsters?" It wasn't that he couldn't roar at this point, but that he was too angry to breathe deep enough for it. As he curled her weak, cold body to his chest, he forced himself to take a hungry gasp. "You were supposed to make her better then take her home like damn decent human beings! WHY THE HELL IS SHE STILL HERE!"

For the first time, he found his concentration for the shadows sharpened by his fury and five, not two, tendrils of shadows ran to his call. One coiled inside the darkness of his cuffs and snapped them open. The other four snapped about the necks of the white coats and the stupid, flummoxed security guard who couldn't even manage to raise his rifle. Useless.

He lifted the doctors, the unfortunate nurse, the security guard, with the ease of a roar and slammed them against the too-white walls.

Out of the corner of his eye, Seto Kaiba watched.

"She's hardly better than when I brought her here, and that was before I had my unfortunate share, and what for? Did you throw her in front of me? Trying to save your own god damn lives?"

"If you're done ranting—"

He hadn't asked the kid. Another tendril snapped out from the shadows and twisted tight about his chest. Several more, uncontrolled outcroppings of blackness shot out. Glass shattered. Lights went out.

For the first time in his three hundred years, Atem wanted to kill. This wasn't the time for the humans to act like curious scientists from a badly written sci-fi wrongly torturing people in the name of science. People were dying, or worse, being damned as forever murderers for the rest of their endless lives.

Though it didn't escape Atem that he hadn't cared or thought any of this just moments ago when he hadn't been crazed with hunger.

"You are going to treat this girl properly this time. I don't care how low you are on blood, you will give it to her and then send her home or every person in this facility is dead." He tightened the shadows, watched their eyes pop. Just for added effect he pushed out his wings and let them fill the narrow hallway.

Movement caught his eye. The down security guard had managed to crawl over to his gun and moved to aim it at him. Atem kicked it out of his hands and stomped down on his chest.

His miraculous dexterity over his shadows was waning now that he had control over the situation. But he let no sign of it show as he dropped the three medical looking figures down first and allowed the their shadows to dissipate. He also let Kaiba go, as he figured the kid had gotten the message.

As he waited for the three doctors to finish coughing and catching their breaths, Kaiba stepped up to him as though he hadn't just been wrangled by Atem a moment before. Kaiba also managed to look very unimpressed, even exasperated.

"Cameras." He pointed to the end of the hall.

All that remained of the little black box had been shattered. Atem got the point though. It wouldn't go unnoticed.

But it wasn't just the cameras Kaiba was pointing out. As Atem met those still humanly blue eyes, his brain caught up with him. There was no going back now that he had shown them the extent of what he could do and how easily he could break through their high security. Atem wasn't just a dangerous monster anymore.

And Yugi was no longer a helpless bystander.

He had been utterly stupid expecting these men to just adhere to his demands. Armed men would be pouring in any second now, ready to overwhelm them, ready to take Yugi and stuff her down even deeper for their questions and use—

And just like that, his panicked thinking cleared to crystal clarity. He could hear Yugi's fluttering heart rate, see just how purple the thin skin around her eyes and mouth had become. Her little body had been drained one too many times.

"Move," he growled at the downed men, stomping forward.

"Am I walking into something that will get me killed?" asked the younger vampire.

Frankly, Atem didn't care what the boy did. Time was of an essence. The doctor's scrambled to their feet and Atem had the foot the nurse over just to discover she had passed out. Forcing the security guard still in his shadows grip to follow, he marched the doctors forward, wings outheld as much as they could go in the little area to give him as much intimidation factor as possible. Let them think he a horrid demon from their worst nightmares come to life.

"Your most secure medical bay, now."

Thankfully, they didn't bother to protest. Both the balding, thin man and the clean cut, salt and pepper one scrambled to their feet and did a sort of side backwards jog as they tried to keep an eye on him and lead as fast as they could at the same time.

It wasn't far, even on the same level. Even so, by the time the gray, younger doctor started swiping his card through a door handle, Atem could hear a distant wail of an alarm and the foreboding tapping of boots.

The door opened. The doctors scuttled in, Atem on their heels, the unfortunate security guard all but dragged in by the lone tendril of shadow. Just as Atem reached to slam the door shut, Kaiba slipped in and did it for him, twisting the lock on the door bar.

"Don't make me regret this, old man," he dared to growl.

But Atem was preoccupied by the sudden faintness of the girl's heartbeat against his arms. Wrapping his wings about her as though to shield her from the surgeons table and the various medical paraphernalia and machinery about him, he turned on the doctors, teeth bared.

"Well?"

The younger doctor suddenly seized up, hands scrunched up against his rip cage like a squirrels, but the second, aged doctor was already in motion, yanking out silver coolers and pulling down plastic bags of tubes and whatnot. The bags of blood he pulled out instantly became dewy on hitting the warmer air, and Atem felt his throat tighten. He inwardly snarled at it, furious that his thirst could even exist at a time like this.

"Lay her down," said the balding man in a quavering voice.

"She's freezing," Atem said the moment he realized he wouldn't be able to let go.

His opinion of the doctor grew as the man didn't argue, only telling him to hold her out and demonstrating an admirable calmness as he tied a rubber band about her arm.

As the seconds grew into minutes as the doctor tried to find her vein and flicked her arm, Atem's apprehension severed the last hold he had on the shadows and the security guard flopped to the floor. No sooner had the man flung himself at the door lock and brought the walkie talkie to his mouth than Kaiba was on him with a knee to the gut. The CEO knocked the walkie talkie from his hand, locked his arms behind his back, and then, without hesitation, leaned down to put his mouth to the man's neck.

The other doctor gave an almost feminine squawk. The doctor at Yugi's arm jerked as though to look up, but must have thought better of it and kept his eyes to her arm. Only a second later he found what he was looking for and pinched the IV into a thin, purple vein. With deft hands he then twisted on the tube, hooked it to one of the bags, and then hung it on a IV pole he had hooked over with his foot.

"Don't jostle it," he told Atem, then, after only a moment of hesitation, he reached out a pair of fingers into the folds of Atem's enclosed wings and pressed them to her neck. The crow's feet at the corner of his eyes tightened as he counted. After thirty seconds, he quickly pulled away and brought up some gause he had brought over. "Would you mind holding this on her arm while I get some antiseptic?"

Outside the door, the tapping of boots had grown to a roar like crashing water. A loud crash made everyone jump.

"Camera," came Seto's muffled voice.

"Open up!" shouted a man from the other side.

Atem tuned out whatever threats they had to say as he turned his attention to keeping Yugi warm and her IV unjostled. It took all his self control not to knock the bottle of rubbing alcohol from the doctors hand when he brought it to disinfect Yugi's wound. Atem could have done so much better. His poultices cleaned and healed a wound faster than any alcohol or filmy gauze they had. Alcohol may help prevent infection, but it also hindered the healing process as it killed off the very bacteria that assisted in it.

But then he reminded himself who put those holes in her arm in the first place.

From behind him, Kaiba had gotten back to his feet. "Where's you're computer?"

"Th-they'll open fire on the door any second—"

"And I'll bite off your head if you don't slow them down and tell me where your computer is."

Atem felt his mouth twitch in a smile.

But it was once more the older doctor who rose to the occasion. His reedy voice was barely heard under the barrage of pounding on the door.

"In the far corner under the plastic," then the reed turned shrill. "STOP OR THEY'LL KILL DOCTOR YASLEY!"

Said Yasley must have been the name of the useless, prettier doctor, for he flinched and gave the other man a betrayed stare.

As Seto hollered a threat to back up that same statement, pulling away plastic all the while, Atem's attention continued to narrow down to the fluttering heartbeat he could feel against his bicep. Sliding onto the surgery table, he curled in around her, wings and all, imagining he could block out all the noise, the chaos, the lights.

Only then did he let the violent trembling overtake him. Only then did the icy fear, black and acidic, eat away at his innards.

"Why did I ever come near you, little one," he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut against it all.

So cold. He remembered her being so warm. All her gentle curves and softness and fit so well in place against him and all his knobby corners back in the day he had slept beside her. Her eyes had been so bright when she had looked down that alleyway, strawberry ice cream across her toes. Her fingers had been gentle, her smile forgiving when he had no place to be forgiven.

A gentle, gravely sort of murmur from outside his wings drew him up from the depths.

"If you could escape all along, why didn't you?"

And because the doctor had so quickly and readily attended to Yugi, Atem answered, even though he knew his voice would betray just how shaken he was.

"I was hoping you'd kill me. I've found out the hard way that trying to kill myself only ends up getting people killed."

"You never once thought we could find a cure?"

Atem let out a short, bitter laugh that was more like a gasp. "I'm a doctor of sorts myself and in…all my years of study and travel I've found nothing."

The doctor paused before saying, "You're a lot older than 24, aren't you?"

Atem let his silence answer that.

Suddenly, all light vanished. Pitch black as Atem, with his sensitive eyes, had rarely known blanketed them.

"Ha!" barked Kaiba. "Freaking everything is digital nowadays."

Outside the door their aggressors let out shouts of alarm. Sharp pattering of bullets clicked against the door. The pansy doctor screamed and dropped to the floor.

But Atem lifted up his head, eyes opening wide. There was nothing but shadow now, pressing in like miles of ocean water, aware of him without conscious thought of its own awareness.

"Think you can use that, old man?" shouted Kaiba above the noise.

"Yes," said Atem, his voice once more strong and sure. No longer would he have to force shadow against its nature and into the light. No longer would he need his sight or senses to feel it out, or concentration to hold it in form.

It was already here.

"Meet you outside?" Kaiba asked.

Atem nodded before realizing the kid couldn't see him. "See you then."

And with that, he reached out to the darkness embracing him and pulled it in.