As promise, second update.
Chapter 38
Atem's spirit stayed awkwardly held up between the grinding bars and the glassless window frame. It screamed as Kaiba's bloodied wrist slipped from his grasp. It dropped in and caught him again, for better or for worse.
But his three hundred years of cold insistence snapped him out of the window, allowing the squealing motor to shut the bars the rest of the way, and snatched back the little Yugi. He cloaked himself in shadows thicker than ever and took to the sky, even as sun-like spotlights switched on and lifted to the sky like the great, searching eyes of a leviathan. He didn't waste time climbing, but shot out far from the penitary's boundaries. Only when the city's lights reach for him did he start to climb. Only when his back started to protest and his skin hardened with cold did he stop, attention abruptly to the girl in his arms. He gently put his fingerpads to her neck. A warbling, too fast heartbeat pattered against them.
He couldn't stay up here long. She couldn't.
After only a moment's debate, he garnered his location and pointed himself towards home.
Countless nights before had he flown this way, thoughts only to his safe, warm apartment. The inattention of humans and their modern culture of moving had kept his agelessness safe for a remarkably long time. It didn't escape him the miracle his ability to call someplace home and work his practice was.
Even so, an aching longing fisted in his chest as he silently touched down on his tiny landing. His aching wings withdrew into his flesh with shivers of relief. Someone had been kind enough to lock his door. He found the key in the gutter and elbowed himself in. Only then did he drop his shadowing cover and lock the door behind him. In a few steps he had the pale little Yugi in his bean bag, with the arm with her IV propped up and laid out straight. He pulled a thumbtack from the corner of his window, where he stored them whenever he found them on the floor, and pinned the blood bag to the wall. He checked the tube for kinks, threw some velvet bags of rice into the microwave for warming, then dropped down to take her vitals.
Despite the bag already being half empty, her rapid heartbeat didn't slow. If anything, it had increased as her heart struggled to keep blood circling through her body. Her lips still had that gray white tinge, and as he held the back of his hand to her mouth, the puffs of air were light, shallow, and weak.
She was dying.
He had watched others die like this whenever the monster had pulled him in just a moment too soon and he woke up before they'd stopped breathing. He'd weakly tended to soldiers, thick with shock, bleed out their last. He'd been by his mother's side when, once, a young mother bleed to death shortly after giving birth.
Seeing those familiar signs in the girl who had only days before smiled as she allowed him to hold her as he slept made the reality of it super imposing, as though the rest of his life had been a dream or a drunk daze.
His brain exploded with life, buzzing so quickly he could barely keep up.
If she has vampire blood, the human blood will be too diluted to help. Her body will have been adapted to work with the highly concentrated, nutrient dense vampiric blood—it wasn't—blood type? What had her blood tasted of—type—
He found it and dug his teeth into his arm. Stomach turning rust and rot caked his tongue, but he forced down the gag reflex, forced himself to taste deeper for type, type—
Yes!
He jumped to his pantry. A jar of preserved thyme crashed as he yanked out the container of plastic wrapped needles. He already had one out and in his own vein when he jumped back to the blood bag thumbtacked to the wall. The tube came out with a stick pop, then onto the other end of the IV in his arm.
Let this work, let this work, it has to work.
His too fast thoughts fed him facts he didn't want to think about: if his thick blood would diffuse as quick as normal blood; if it was too late; if her body would accept straight vampiric blood; if she would die—she would die, tiny, cold, chapped blue lips parted as though asleep—
Though his knees knocked into each other, and a hysteric wail gathered at the back of his tongue, he kept upright to add gravity to pushing his blood into Yugi's beneath him.
The bright red human blood quickly turned to dark maroon.
What if she doesn't wake up? What if it takes too much and my instincts take over? What if she—
She's dying. She's dying. She might be already dead, just reach down-
"SHUT UP!" The scream didn't even sound like him.
Tears blurred his vision more quickly than jumping into a lake would have. His throat kept sticking up, forcing him to breath in clumpy gasps.
You've taken too much. Her organs will already be damaged beyond repair from going this far. First kidneys, then intestines—cells suffocating by the trillions—
Diagrams of all the books he had read on cellular metabolism and ATP processing rushed through his mind's eye at lightning speeds.
"Shut up!" he hadn't the breath. It came out a gasp. "Yugi."
He had to hold her. He had to feel her heartbeat. But he had to stay standing. If there was any chance, any hope—but she would be freezing—then he remembered the rice bags sitting in the microwave and cursed. There could be no going now. He couldn't risk upsetting his needle and getting it clogged. But he had only thrown a blanket on her, he had only—
"Yugi," he gasped. "Yugi. Yugi."